Constitutional Law

Senate Examines Federal Court Barriers To Worker Discrimination Cases

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee today heard extensive tesitmony on the increasing struggles employees face in acheiving workplace equality.

Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), in his opening remarks this morning, highlighted inequality in pay and the increasing refusal of federal courts to hear employment discrimination legal actions.

“The current Supreme Court seems increasingly willing to overturn juries who heard the factual evidence and decided in the case," Leahy said. "In employment discrimination cases, statistics show that the Federal Courts of Appeal are five times more likely to overturn an employee’s favorable trial verdict against her employer than they are to overturn a verdict in favor of the corporation.”

Testifying before the committee, Cyrus Mehri, a founding partner of the law firm Mehri & Skalet, highlighted a new study released last week by ACS revealing that “the federal courts disfavor employment discrimination plaintiffs.” Holding up a copy of the study, Mehri called it “seminal.” Mehri, who participated in an ACS panel discussion on the study by Cornell Law School Dean Stewart J. Schwab and Cornell Law Professor Kevin M. Clermont, said the study revealed hostility in the courts to employment discrimination lawsuits. Mehri added that the study found that the hostility to plaintiffs’ employment discrimination claims has resulted in “an absolute drop in employment discrimination cases of 37 percent from fiscal 1999-2007.” Mehri’s testimony can be obtained from the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Web site.

Lilly Ledbetter, a leading voice for pay equality in America, also addressed the committee. Ledbetter, a former Goodyear Tire Company worker who led a legal challenge against the company after she discovered that she had been compensated substantially less than her male-workers, asked the committee, “Why in 2008 are so many women being paid unfairly?”

Ledbetter’s lawsuit was successful against Goodyear at the trial court level, where a jury found that the company owed her more than $200,000 in pay. But the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that judgment in its 2007 Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. decision. Ledbetter urged the senators to advance the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to “make sure that people can challenge discriminatory paychecks as long as they continue to receive them. My case is over. I will never receive the pay I deserve. But I will feel vindicated once again if I can play even the smallest role in ensuring that what happened to me will not happen to anyone else.”

Full post as published by ACS Blog on September 23, 2008 (boomark / email).