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  3. Marjorie McMillan, head of radiology at a veterinary hospital, found out by reading a letter to the editor in her local newspape

Marjorie McMillan, head of radiology at a veterinary hospital, found out by reading a letter to the editor in her local newspape

admin2017-03-15  79
问题     Marjorie McMillan, head of radiology at a veterinary hospital, found out by reading a letter to the editor in her local newspaper. Pamela Goodwin, a labor-relations expert at General Motors, happened to see a computer printout. Stephanie Odle, an assistant manager at a Sam’s Club store, was slipped a co-worker’s tax form.
    Purely by accident, these women learned they were making less than their male or, in Goodwin’s case, white colleagues at work. Each sued for pay discrimination under federal law, lucky enough to discover what typically stays a secret. "People don’t just stand around the watercooler to talk about how much they make," says McMillan.
    This, as they say, is the real world, one in which people would rather discuss their sex lives than salaries. And about a third of private employers actually prohibit employees from sharing pay information. It is also a world that the US Supreme Court seems unfamiliar with. The Justices recently decided 5 to 4 that workers are out of luck if they file a complaint under Title VII—the main federal antidiscrimination law—more than 180 days after their salary is set. That’s six measly months to find out what your co-workers are making so that you can tell whether you’re getting chiseled because of your sex, race, religion or national origin.
    How many of the roughly 2,800 such complaints pending before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will fizzle because of this new rule is hard to say. Less of a mystery, though just as troubling, is how the court reached its decision.
    Lilly Ledbetter filed the case against Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. because at the end of a 19-year career, she was making far less than any of 15 men at her level. She argued that Goodyear violated Title VII every time it gave her a smaller paycheck. Her complaint was timely, she said, because she filed it within 180 days of her last check. But the court majority read the statute to mean that only an actual decision to pay Ledbetter less could be illegal, and that happened well outside the 180-day period.
    A statute’s ambiguous wording is fair game, but why read it to frustrate Title VII’s purpose: to ease pay discrimination in a nation where women make only 770￠ on average for every $1 that men earn? And while employers might like this decision, they could end up choking on the torrent of lawsuits that might now come their way. "The real message is that if you have any inkling that you are being paid differently, you need to file now, before the 180 days are up," says Michael Foreman of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights.
    All this sounds familiar. In June 1989, the Supreme Court issued three decisions that sharply limited the right to sue over employment discrimination. A day after the most prominent ruling, in Wards Cove v. Atonio, Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D., Ohio) declared that he would introduce a bill to overturn the decisions.
    It took civil rights advocates and their congressional allies eight months to introduce legislation. President George H.W. Bush vetoed the first version, arguing that it would encourage hiring quotas. Finally, in late 1991, the Democratic Congress and the Republican President reached a compromise fashioned by Senators John Danforth (R., Mo.) and Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.). It became the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and overturned parts of eight high-court decisions.
    Now, Foreman and others are working on a bill to overturn the Ledbetter case, and Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, among others, have expressed interest. A Democratic Congress may well cooperate, though with a Republican again in the White House, final legislation before next year’s elections isn’t guaranteed. In any event, we probably won’t see the kind of groundswell that shifted the law toward workers in 1991 because civil rights advocates aren’t sure these Justices are a threat to workers’ rights. Last June, for example, they made it harder for employers to retaliate against employees who complain of discrimination. That left the Ledbetter ruling looking particularly clueless. "I heard the decision and thought, What is wrong  with this court?" says McMillan. "It just doesn’t live in the real world."
Which of the following is likely to sympathize with the victims of pay discrimination?
选项 A、George W. Bush.
B、US Supreme Court.
C、Hillary Clinton.
D、Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
答案C
解析
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