Grace and Grit (29 page)

We had just pulled out of the driveway when my cell phone rang. I retrieved it from among the scattered contents in my purse. Mike Quinn was on the other end; Jon was out of town, and he had some news to tell me. I motioned for Charles to pull back into the driveway.

My connection was bad, and I strained to hear Mike. “Let me call you right back,” I said. I told Charles to wait and ran inside to the den to use the landline.

“Lilly, I have to let you know the verdict,” Mike said in an awful rush of words once we’d reconnected. “We lost. The Supreme Court ruled against us. I’m sorry.”

I was quiet for a moment, letting the disheartening news seep into my bones. I had really held out hope that justice would prevail. “I’m sorry, too,” I finally said.

I thanked him for all he and Jon and everyone else had done. He told me I might get a few media calls. “Don’t get too caught up in the temporary frenzy. It will die out soon enough,” he assured me.

I set the phone on the table. I noticed the spot where the charred wood paneling had been replaced from a fire long ago, and I remembered the blizzard of 1993, when we’d experienced a freak snowstorm in March. Several feet of snow had blanketed the area, and the power had gone out. I’d fallen asleep on the sofa with a candle burning on the table close to my head. The flame had licked the top of my bleached-blond head lacquered with hairspray resting on the arm of the sofa. I woke up with my hair on fire. Later, I was convinced I’d been spared for a special reason, but I had yet to figure out why; and for a selfish, childish moment after hearing the verdict, I’m ashamed to say this, especially when Charles was suffering so, I wished I hadn’t been spared in that fire.

I looked up. Charles had followed me inside and caught the end of the conversation.

“We lost,” I told him, watching him take the news, stabbed for a frozen moment like he’d swallowed a cold drink too fast and was overtaken by an ice headache.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

But I was the one who was sorry, sorry I’d put him through so much. Vickie and Phillip’s school pictures still hung on our den wall. I looked at a picture of Vickie in college, her long, light-brown hair parted in the middle, the style in the late seventies, around the time I started at Goodyear. The first thing the secretary had told me when I started working was that if I wanted to succeed at
Goodyear, I’d do two things: I’d contribute to United Way every year, and I wouldn’t discuss my paycheck. The way she said it made me feel like I’d disappear into the night if I didn’t do exactly what she said.

Charles, who’d lost so much weight that his shirt fell slack from his once-broad shoulders, sat down on the sofa. “What are you going to do now?” he asked, the side of his face marbled with the dark purple scar, zigzagging like the jagged edge of a lightning strike down the side of a pine tree.

“It’s not what I wanted to hear, but we can’t stop living. We had the best attorney, and we did the best we could. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. There’s nothing else left to do but go to lunch.”

I couldn’t hide now that it was over; I had more important things to tend to for the time being. And for the moment, that was enough. Despite the deep disappointment, I needed to focus on Charles and my own life now. I’d done what I could. Goodyear was simply a greater force than I could overcome. That was clear as day.

C
HARLES AND
I never finished our meal the day of the verdict. At lunch we had kept the news to ourselves, not wanting to dampen anyone else’s spirits. But in the middle of my moving my chicken salad from one side of my plate to the other, my cell phone rang again. I reached for my purse, almost knocking the arm of the waitress who was refilling my glass of tea.

It was NBC. Could they send a film crew to my house to do an interview for the nightly news with Brian Williams? I agreed, and when I finished talking to the producer, we had to tell our group of friends, since we had to leave quickly—my house was a mess and we needed to clean up a little.

The film crew arrived and rearranged all my furniture. That night I answered the phone and a man’s voice said, “This is Norman Lear. Do you know who I am?” Of course I knew who he was;
I watched
All in the Family
and
The Jeffersons
. How did
he
know who
I
was? He wanted to film a video to run on YouTube.

Then CNN called. The next day the CNN film crew came and rearranged the house again. I kept expecting my phone to stop ringing, but the public outcry was deafening and media from around the world appeared on my doorstep. One of the first newspaper reporters to contact me was Linda Greenhouse from the
New York Times
. She wanted to know whether I had heard Justice Ginsburg’s dissent. No, actually, I hadn’t.

In a rare moment, Justice Ginsburg had voiced her dissent, joined by three other justices—John Paul Stevens, David Souter, and Stephen Breyer—from the bench, addressing their dissatisfaction with the outcome of the case and the effects on employment laws. Only six times before, in thirteen terms on the Court, had Justice Ginsburg found it appropriate to underscore her dissent by reading a summary of it aloud in the courtroom.

“The Court’s insistence on immediate contest overlooks common characteristics of pay discrimination,” Justice Ginsburg declared. “Pay disparities often occur, as they did in Ledbetter’s case, in small increments; cause to suspect that discrimination is at work develops only over time. … Small initial discrepancies may not be seen as meat for a federal case, particularly when the employee, trying to succeed in a nontraditional environment, is averse to making waves.” She went on to challenge what was the current law:

Justice Ginsburg hit the nail on the head when she said that the majority’s decision didn’t make sense in the real world. People don’t go around asking their colleagues how much money they make; in most workplaces, you get fired for discussing one another’s salaries. Anyway, even if you know that some people are being paid more than you, that’s not necessarily a good reason to immediately suspect discrimination. Most people assume they work for an employer who does the right thing.

U
NBELIEVABLY
, J
USTICE
Samuel Alito’s written opinion implied that I should have complained every time I received a smaller raise than the men, even if I didn’t know what the men were making and even if I had no way to prove that these pay decisions were discrimination. The Court ruled that once 180 days have passed from the initial pay decision, the worker is stuck with unequal pay for equal work for the rest of her career and there is nothing illegal about it. Basically, the Supreme Court had ruled that if you don’t clue in right away, the company can treat you like a second-class citizen for your entire career. And now, with the reversal in precedent, I wasn’t the only one who had to swallow the consequences of pay discrimination—every other working woman in America was
being forced into the same corner. But the majority didn’t understand that, or didn’t care. How they could have thought Congress would have intended the law to be so unfair, I’ll never know.

Another thing I’ve never understood about the ruling is how in the world Justice Thomas voted against me. Growing up in the South, he, too, must have experienced discrimination. For goodness sakes, he grew up in a county poor like mine. And I knew from what I’d seen at Goodyear that women were treated with kid gloves compared to the way some people acted when it came to working with African Americans. (Whenever I contemplate this, I remember how, when I was a child, Papa would cross the street whenever he saw a black person and how I’d try to catch the eye of the person to smile in sympathy. The rural South wasn’t an easy place to live for African Americans, to say the least.)

What I did understand when Justice Ginsburg voiced her dissent as the only female voice on the Court is that the importance of women being appointed to the Court cannot be underestimated. My case shows that those individuals who are appointed to the Supreme Court really make a difference. If one more person like Justice Ginsburg or Justice Stevens had been on the Court—one more person who understood what it’s like for ordinary people living in the real world—then my case would have turned out differently. Most people I’ve talked to simply can’t believe what happened to me and want to ensure that something like this doesn’t happen again. They don’t care if the justices are Democrats or Republicans, or which president appointed them, or which senators voted for them. They want justices who understand that the law must serve regular hardworking folks who are just trying to do right and make a better life for their families. And when the law isn’t clear, justices need to use some common sense and remember that the people who write laws are usually trying to make a law that’s fair and sensible. This isn’t a game. Real people’s lives are at stake.

I won’t lie; I was pretty devastated by the Court’s decision. The ruling had severely limited the ability of victims of pay discrimination to vindicate their rights under Title VII.

In one fell swoop, I lost my case and became the poster child for
un
equal pay for equal work. And the real clincher is, as I’ve said before, Goodyear continues to treat me like a second-class citizen because my pension and Social Security are based on the amount I earned—Goodyear gets to keep my extra pension as a reward for breaking the law.

Instead of taking what happened quietly, swept up by the current of outrage from numerous organizations such as the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), the American Association of University Women (AAUW), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the AFL-CIO, the National Employment Lawyers Association (NELA), and the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), to name only a few, I decided to fight back. For the sake of my granddaughter and future generations of women and their families, I refused to take this unjust ruling lying down. I owed that much not just to myself but to all of America’s women and girls, who deserved a fighting chance.

Ready to stand with me every step of the way were passionate women: Jocelyn Samuels, an early advocate for Title IX, which leveled the playing field for girls and women in sports; Marcia Greenberger, founder and copresident of the National Women’s Law Center; and Lisa Maatz, from the American Association of University Women. These women showed me that Justice Ginsburg, her dissenting colleagues, and I weren’t the only ones who thought the ruling was crazy. As these women, now my lifelong friends, marched me before their members, I became filled with a sense of mission. Pay equity wasn’t my personal problem; it wasn’t a southern problem or even a national issue. Pay inequity was an international epidemic that needed to be remedied. What was
required now was a simple legislative fix to restore the law to how it was applied by the EEOC and the lower courts prior to that crazy Supreme Court ruling.

I
NSPIRED BY
Justice Ginsburg’s dissent and dressed in the black Talbot jacket and skirt Vickie bought me, I spent the next two years traversing the halls of Congress telling my story. I lived to fulfill a greater purpose. Though I may have lost the case—and my $3.8 million verdict—I was made a figurehead of pay inequality from that day forward. The ruling, and Justice Ginsburg’s dissent, put me at the helm of a civil rights issue larger than myself. Perhaps naïvely, I hoped that Congress would recognize the urgent importance of women’s equality in the workplace and pass a bill to prevent future cases like mine.

This bill would reverse the Supreme Court’s decision, helping to ensure that individuals subjected to unlawful pay discrimination had an effective recourse to assert their rights under the federal antidiscrimination laws. The bill would reinstate prior law and adopt the paycheck-accrual rule, making each discriminatory paycheck, rather than the original decision to discriminate, the starting point for a new claim-filing period. The paycheck-accrual rule provides sufficient time for employees to evaluate and confirm that they have been subject to discrimination.

Ultimately, what would become the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act would protect workers from workplace discrimination as Congress intended.

The House Democrats immediately heeded Justice Ginsburg’s clarion call for Congress to amend the law. Jon and I flew to Washington together to meet with House Education and Workforce Committee chairman George Miller, a tall, white-haired man from California, to discuss the proposed bill, HR 11. After we returned to Alabama, Representative Miller called Jon to ask about
naming the bill after me. When Jon told me this, I said, “Well, that would be fine by me.”

“It’s a great honor,” he remarked.

“It certainly is,” I said, amazed at this turn of events. “And now Goodyear will never forget me.”

Only a month after the Supreme Court verdict, in June 2007, House majority leader Steny Hoyer and Representative Miller announced that a bill would be passed to prevent future court rulings in line with mine. Republicans including Howard “Buck” McKeon, a ranking member of the Education and Workforce Committee, opposed the bill, contending that it made companies vulnerable to disgruntled employees seeking damages years later when the company couldn’t offer a meaningful defense.