Bluestem wonders if the Republican Primary Battle for HD48B will hinge in part on pandering to the base's resistance to proposals to address gender-based inequality.
For a good review of just what gender-based inequality might be, check out Carolyn Lange's Research shows inequality persists for women and girls in Wednesday's West Central Tribune.
The women vying for the Republican endorsement in Eden Prairie each has something to say about women's economic security, and the range seems to range from ignorance to not-quite-so-extreme market-based policy
Sheila loathed Lilly Ledbetter Act early
In June 2007, challenger Sheila Kihne wrote to the Eden Prairie News to say in Puzzled by attacks on Hann:
The old issue of "equal pay" is being resurrected by the Democrats at the state level with the Phyllis Kahn authored "Pay Equity for Contractors Bill" and at the federal level with the Barack Obama sponsored “Fair Pay Act of 2007.” Sen. [David] Hann calls such laws “illogical and absurd.” I agree. The recent letters to the editor attacking Sen. Hann's statements about this type of legislation leave me puzzled. Equal opportunity does not mean equal outcomes. The government simply cannot and should not dictate pay to private companies whether it's through the awarding of bids based on a company's deemed "fairness" in pay or whether it's through legislation setting wage controls for "equivalent" jobs. That is a function of the market, not the government and when the federal government wants to define and set salaries for private sector employees, people should be very afraid. If a woman can prove that she is paid less for the exact same job with the exact same qualifications and that she is being discriminated against – she can already sue under current laws [emphasis added]. Why then should there be additional legislation to address this issue? Government bureaucracies can barely determine who's in our country illegally, yet they're able to process the data on $7 trillion worth of annual wages and issue an edict of "fairness" by job description? When it comes to wages and salary; job choice determines pay, hard work prevails and the market is always correct. Why must the government continually be involved in trying to produce equal outcomes?
Clearly, Kihne's puzzled by these matters and seems to have been mighty confused in 2007 about "the Barack Obama sponsored 'Fair Pay Act of 2007.' "
KIhne sincerely appears to have believed in 2007 that if a woman discovered that her employer was paying a male co-worker more than she was being paid, that under then-current law, she could sue for discrimination.
Well, no. And as those commies at the Society for Human Resource Management wrote in Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007:
. . . The legislation clarifies that employment discrimination law should be interpreted the way courts have traditionally understood it – until the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a more restrictive interpretation in the 2007 Ledbetter V. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. decision. In this case, the Court ruled that plaintiff Lilly Ledbetter was not eligible for compensation despite years of being paid far less than her male peers and even some male subordinates. According the Court, unlawful discrimination had occurred only when her employer first set the discriminatory pay rate, even though Ledbetter had no way of knowing about it until years later. Under this ruling, since Ledbetter’s employer was able to conceal the discrimination for years and she did not find out about the discrimination until it was too late to file a complaint (within 180 days of the first discriminatory paycheck, according to the Court), she had no legal recourse. By reaffirming that a fresh discrimination offense occurs each time an individual is impacted by a discriminatory practice, including each paycheck that includes unfair compensation, this legislation effectively reverses the Supreme Court’s decision and ensures that people subjected to discrimination in the future will continue to have effective recourse to the law.
Read the entire statement on the group's site. The Supreme Court's decision and Ginsburg's dissent, along with a syllabus, is found here.
Introduced by the late Senator Ted Kennedy as chief sponsor, he 2007 version failed cloture on April 23, 2008, but the first bill President Obama signed into law in 2009 was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009.
Kihne earned Phi Beta Kappa at the U, so we're going to assume that she understands the description of the legal circumstances delineated by the human resource professionals.
Bluestem readers who prefer a more dramatic story will prefer the account from the Washington Post coverage of the 2009 passage of the bill, Democrats Overturn Barrier to Unequal-Pay Suits:
. . .Several months before she retired in 1998 as a Goodyear area manager, Ledbetter found an anonymous note in her mailbox at work, tipping her off that she was being paid less than the men who held the same job. That year, she filed an EEOC complaint and received a letter from the commission saying that she had grounds to sue.
She won a jury verdict in U.S. district court in 2003, but Goodyear appealed. Two years later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in a ruling that departed from those of nine other federal appellate courts, sided with Goodyear, saying Ledbetter was years too late to sue.
She took the case to the Supreme Court, which upheld the appellate court's view in a 5 to 4 opinion written by its newest member, Justice Samuel A. Alito, a Bush appointee. At the time, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave a rare oral dissent, saying she hoped Congress would reverse what the court had done. . . .
Ledbetter said in an interview that she was "thrilled, thrilled." She said the Supreme Court's ruling means that she never will be able to claim the $360,000 she was awarded by a lower court. But she said: "The people who are working deserve to have this right. . . . I am so excited, I doubt I will be able to sleep tonight."
On Planet Kihne, "fairnes" means that a woman could sue, but only within 180 days of commencement of the act of discrimination. Don't know about it within that time? Tough beans, even if the discrimination goes on for years, robbing a woman of wages that her male peers received.
Jenifer: No state contract equity compliance for you!
As for the Kahn bill? It didn't pass, but similiar legislation introduced by Rena Moran as part of the WESA package has made it into law seven years--and arguments close to Kihne's complaints accompanied the debate, as Lori Sturdevant noted in Progress, past and present, for women.
Governor Dayton signed the WESA omnibus package into law on Mother's Day. A pay equity compliance section was part of the package:
Reduces the gender pay gap through increased enforcement of equal pay laws for state contractors by requiring businesses with 40 or more employees seeking state contracts over $500,000 to certify they are paying equal wages to workers regardless of gender.
The conference report on the bill passed the Minnesota House 104-24, with Jenifer Loon among the naysayers. MPR's Tom Scheck reported in House passes Women’s Economic Security Act, Senate outlook cloudy:
The bill also requires state contractors to certify that they provide men and woman in the same job categories similar pay.
The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce is raising concerns over that portion of the legislation. The business group says the reporting requirements are confusing and could increase litigation costs for businesses.
Rep. Jenifer Loon, R-Eden Prairie, opposed the bill. She said it puts too many expenses on employers and could discourage businesses from bidding on state contracts.
“It just may not be worth the hassle,” Loon said. “It also sets up a situation where we’re not just going after bad actors. This is auditing folks and incurring expense where they may very well be the ones where we hold up examples of doing the right thing.”
And that cloudy part? A handful of women DFL Senators acting in tandem with the state Chamber, who were reluctant to support a conference report that such staunch Republican feminists like Mary Franson and Tony Cornish had already green-buttoned in the House vote.
But at least their and Loon's objections to the bill weren't simply bassackward, like KIhne's imaginative understanding of the 2007 version of the Lilly Ledbetter Act.
The race to inequity?
But to judge from a blog post by one of Kihne's strongest supporters, Loon has parked herself squared in the Land of Kahn. John Gilmore writes:
Loon introduced legislation that would reduce property taxes for businesses owned by women. At a time when we, as republicans and a nation, are trying to move further and further away from identity politics, here comes a left-wing democrat idea. Who was it that said to me on Twitter last week we don't promote women simply because they are women? Perhaps that woman can talk to Jenifer and set her straight (or is that word hetero-normative?) about republicans not being a party that gives financial breaks for some taxpayers simply because of their gender.
We're curious where this dance-off will end by August 12. Whatever the case, we anticipate it generating some choice copy.
Photo: Lilly Ledbetter. Silly woman: Sheila Kihne said in 2007 that you could just sue if you learned you'd been discriminated against by your employer and no new law was needed. Oh, right. (Photo via Bozeman Daily Chronicle).
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