Lilly Ledbetter and the persistence of discrimination

I met Lilly Ledbetter two weeks ago at a conference in Arizona where she was being honored. I was lucky enough to share lunch with her and talk.

If there was ever any doubt that she was an extraordinarily capable and dedicated employee for Goodyear, a brief meeting would dispel that immediately.

She's serious, smart, funny, and truly a reluctant activist. She didn't set out to change the laws governing employment discrimination lawsuits but the unfairness she discovered was so extreme and so far-reaching in its consequences that she had no choice. After almost 20 years working as a manager at a Goodyear plant in Alabama, she discovered (through an anonymous tip) that she was being paid only 87% of the salary paid to her lowest male counterpart and only 72% of that paid to her highest paid male counterpart--men working in the same jobs at the same level with comparable performance ratings to hers.

She sued, won huge damages in a lower court; Goodyear appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court. Every appellate court confirmed the verdict, but it was overturned by the Supreme Court, which argued that she hadn't brought suit soon enough. The relevant law said she needed to sue within 180 days of the discriminatory pay practices being put into effect. This had been impossible, of course, because Ledbetter didn't know how grossly she was being mistreated until she'd spent nearly two decades in exemplary service to the company.

Her case prompted the first piece of legislation signed into law by President Obama after taking office: The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which gives plaintiffs a much longer window to bring suit.

Goodyear, however, has remained unrepentant, and since the Supreme Court overturned the lower court's damages award, Lilly will be suffering for the rest of her life from Goodyear's mistreatment.

As she explained when I met her, her contributions and Goodyear's matching contributions to her 401(k) were based on her salary all those years, as were the company's contributions to Social Security on her behalf. As a result, her total annual retirement income will be much lower than it would have been if she'd been fairly paid. And since she was paid so badly, she couldn't afford to save extra money for her waning years.

She now has health problems (the past few years have been extremely stressful, as you might imagine) but she still travels constantly to tell her story and to speak up for the Paycheck Fairness Act, which is still to be passed.

She's an inspirational figure, and I for one will be boycotting Goodyear products from now on.

Racial profiling, health care reform, wage inequality: The burden on minority women

Big talk about the persistence of racial profiling after the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of Harvard by a white Cambridge police officer. Lots of discussion of the subtle racism still experienced by middle-class male African Americans. (http://bit.ly/DHmhL)

All true and troubling, but to paint a fuller picture of the subtle forms of discrimination dominating the lives of African Americans, we also need to include the experiences of minority women. For them, the problems center less on the perils of 'driving while black' and more on the hobbling inequities of 'working while black.'

Ntozake Shange's 1975 play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf... (produced on Broadway in '76, with a film version scheduled for release in 2010 http://bit.ly/6emAk), first pointed out to a broader American audience something that African American women always knew: They labor under the dual disadvantages of being both black AND female.

In the 34 years since Shange wrote the play, not much--or not enough--has changed.

This is relevant to both the health care debate and to the (woefully inadequate) imminent increase in the minimum wage. Why? Because far greater proportions of minority women and children live without health care, and far greater proportions of minority women with children are single heads-of-households toiling in low-wage jobs. Even for middle-class black women with secure jobs and health care benefits, such as female lawyers (http://bit.ly/BqGmN), wage discrimination hits hard.

The lead editorial in the same issue of the NY Times (July 24, 09) (http://bit.ly/2ztxSa) points out--improbably and stunningly--that the minimum wage in this country, adjusted for inflation, was at its highest in 1968.

This means that unskilled single black women with children are earning less in real dollars than they were 40 years ago. And when those minority women move up into better-paying fields, wages in those fields fall. (Employment Inequities and Minority Women: The Role of Wage Devaluation, by Vinita Ambwani and Lorraine Dyke, International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities, and Nations. http://bit.ly/efXDj)

With so many American families, including many white families, now depending on women as their primary wage earners, compelling evidence suggests that many problems in the American economy could be addressed by eradicating wage inequality.

Equal Pay for Working Families (1999), estimated that "If women were to receive wages equal to those of comparable men, working families across the United States would gain a staggering $200 billion in family income annually, with each working woman's family gaining more than $4,000 per year." (Research funded jointly by the Institute for Women's Policy Research and the AFL-CIO: http://www.iwpr.org/pdf/c344.pdf)

The benefits for minority women would be even more dramatic: In 1999, minority women earned only 58.5 percent of wages earned by white men (this percentage has changed very little since then), significantly less even than the percentage earned by white women (74.4 percent of men's earnings then, 78.2% now).

This seems like a no-brainer: So much talk about wanting to help out the American family, so many big brains looking for ways to boost our struggling economy. How about starting with simple fairness: Paying people for the value of the work they do regardless of their race or gender?

See also:

Wall Street Journal, Wage Inequality is Bankrupting Social Security: http://bit.ly/jKXNV

Thomas Shapiro, The Hidden Cost of Being African American, http://bit.ly/VvuUo

Millennials want what women want

Attended a reception at the Asia Society in NYC Thursday night to celebrate publication of the Harvard Business Review article, 'How Gen Y & Boomers Will Reshape Your Agenda,' (http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2009/07/how-gen-y--boomers-will-reshape-your-agenda/ar/1) by my colleagues at CWLP, the Center for Work-Life Policy (http://www.worklifepolicy.org/).

The article, and the research that backs it, (http://www.worklifepolicy.org/index.php/section/research_pubs#278) reveals the millennial generation in a whole new light. Rather than the spoiled, flaky, self-absorbed kids who don't want to buckle down, commit to their employers or their professions, and get serious, the Center's research shows them to be dedicated and enthusiastic about their work and, dare I say it, much SANER than the ambitious members of previous generations.

Millennials want their work to be stimulating and challenging; they don't want to stagnate. They want work to bring out their creativity, use and respect their technological sophistication, and, most notably from my perspective, they want work to play an important but not overwhelming role in their lives. They want room for their hobbies and other interests. They're strongly committed to service and giving back to their communities. They don't want to work those 'extreme jobs' that require 24/7 on-call global commitment--or if they do now, they don't want to make the sacrifices those jobs require (health, diet, sleep, sex, social lives) indefinitely. They want flexible schedules and the freedom to work from home sometimes. They want to interrupt the forward-momentum of their careers once in a while, take breaks to travel, enhance or acquire new skills, focus intensively on their causes, and participate fully in raising their kids. They want balance.

Strikingly, the research shows that many Boomers, on the verge of retirement, want pretty much the same things. After flat-out, full speed ahead, 70-hour-a-week careers, Boomers want to power down--and find a little more balance in their lives too.

Or, as Horacio Rozanski, a partner and chief personnel officer at Booz Allen Hamilton, a long-time member of CWLP's Hidden Brain Drain task force, and panel member that night, said, "Now EVERYONE wants what women want." In the new, saner workplace of tomorrow, desiring a little balance in one's life, wanting flexibility and the freedom to work remotely, will no longer be a women's issue, or restricted to the mothers of small children. Organizations will need to develop good work-life balance benefits not simply to satisfy the diversity police but to woo and retain the best and brightest of the young generation entering the workplace. A stunning change, and one that bodes well for the culture of business and the competitiveness of our global organizations--if they get the message.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/15/work-life-balance-forbes-woman-leadership-flextime.html

http://workexposedblog.com/2009/01/08/can-you-engage-the-millennials-in-work/