Editorials

Mrs. Kafka works the midnight shift at the Gadsden tire plant. Or so it would seem from a reading of a Supreme Court ruling.

Lilly Ledbetter went to work for Goodyear Tire and Rubber's Gadsden plant in 1979. Most of her tenure was spent in management. When she retired in 1998, Ledbetter was the sole female supervisor at the facility; that had been the case for much of her tenure.

A court document picks up the story and neatly sums up her situation, “By the end of 1997, Ledbetter was the only woman working as an area manager and the pay discrepancy between Ledbetter and her 15 male counterparts was stark: Ledbetter was paid $3,727 per month; the lowest paid male area manager received $4,286 per month, the highest paid, $5,236.”

Bothered by this, Ledbetter went to court, citing legal protections against gender-based discrimination contained in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

At first things went well enough. A Birmingham jury in federal district court examined Ledbetter's claim and awarded her $3 million. But then Ledbetter's “up is down” odyssey began. As if two decades weren't enough, the federal trial judge gave her one more pay cut, reducing the award from $3 million to $360,000.

An Atlanta appeals court went one better. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit took away the $360,000 and reversed the jury's decision. Its reasoning, if one can call it that, was agreed to by a 5-4 margin in the Supreme Court, which announced its ruling this week.

In order for Ledbetter to establish a nearly two-decade pattern of salary discrimination, the court said, she would have had to have filed suit within 180 days of getting a smaller raise than her male counterparts.

How would she have discovered information like this, the sort of secret information typically kept quiet at the workplace? Not our problem, thundered the five justices who assumed the role of officious bean-counters with hearts of stone.

The majority reversed a long-held policy of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which had sided with Ledbetter throughout the process. The Bush administration, always on the watch to protect large companies from lone female managers, broke with its own federal agency and took the side of the tiremaker.

And so Ledbetter lends her name to a case that may signal a new and disturbing direction of the court, one that swears to despise activism while doing what it can to actively protect its benefactors.

Is there any sunlight on this Kafkaesque turn of events? Something else beside Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's desperate dissent, which begs Congress to get involved to right this wrong?

Perhaps a Supreme Court justice who once headed the EEOC and who might lend his reason and on-the-job experience to a frustrating case of unfair compensation based on gender?

Nah, as usual, Clarence Thomas voted with the anti-labor majority.