APOLOGY:
When I posted the reference to Stuart Taylor’s article on the National Journal website, it was available to the general public. Sometime thereafter, the article was restricted to subscribers to the full magazine and website services.
The substance of the article was that, however laudable the idea of giving women a legal recourse in cases of genuine pay discrimination, the implementation of that recourse in the so-called Ledbetter act creates more problems than it solves. It opens the door for the tort bar to convert individual cases into class action suits that easily could bankrupt small company employers.
• Definitions of discrimination and time periods are too vague.
• Eliminating the time period within which a plaintiff may take action means, for example, that a woman retired as much as 20 years could decide that 20 years earlier she was a victim of discrimination and sue her former employer. Her performance records likely would long since been discarded, and her former supervisors could be dead or far removed from the employer for many years. An employer could be defenseless, even if there was no discrimination in compensation.
• Large numbers of credible studies by academics as well as by business economists make it clear that the differences in pay between women and men are very seldom the result of discrimination. Playing a much larger part are other factors, such as maternity leave, women’s aversion to extra work hours, the competitiveness of men jostling for higher-paying jobs, and unwillingness in many cases to accept the responsibility attached to a higher pay grade.
• The net effect could be to make it harder for women to get jobs.
• No doubt insurers will come up with liability policies to protect employers, but that cost will just make it harder for businesses, particularly small ones, to compete against imports.
• Such insurance costs will be passed along to the public in higher prices and in lower wages for all employees.
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