MORGANTOWN — Fair pay pioneer and activist Lilly Ledbetter told her Morgantown audience Tuesday evening the foundational principle of her years of fighting for her cause: “It’s not what happens to us but what do we do about it.”
Ledbetter won and then lost a years-long battle for gender pay equality at Goodyear, but continued her fight and became the namesake of landmark 2009 congressional legislation. Author of “Grace and Grit: My Fight for Equal Pay and Fairness at Goodyear and Beyond,” she continues her fight to this day.
She brought her story and her message to WVU Tuesday as part of WVU’s Hardesty Festival of Ideas.
It was noted in here introduction that the timing of her appearance was serendipitous. Tuesday marked the 100th anniversary of West Virginia’s ratification of the 19th Amendment granting women suffrage. Sunday was International Women’s Day and March is National Women’s Month.
As it happens, her appearance also followed the end of the 2020 legislative session, where the Senate’s Katherine Johnson Fair Pay Act and the House Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughn Fair Pay Act both died without committee reviews. Both bills saw efforts on Feb. 24 to have them discharged and brought to their respective floors tabled by the majority.
Ledbetter told her story of coming to Goodyear with great hope and her difficult, eye-opening journey.
She’d had years of management experience under her belt, she said, when Goodyear decided to open a tire factory in Gadsden, Ala.
Goodyear was promoting its new plant’s progressive hiring practices for women. “I felt that this would be a great opportunity for me and build up my family’s income,” help pay for their children’s education and save for retirement.
The company had an express prohibition against discussing pay. Nineteen years after she began work there, she learned why. An anonymous note passed to her revealed that among four co-equal managers, three male and her, she was making 40% less. The top male was making $6,000 per month compared to her $3,700.
She felt she was due equal pay. “I wasn’t asking a favor. This is what I was entitled to and had earned it.” Given her age and the family’s needs, she couldn’t quit or retire.
But she could fight. And her husband supported her all the way. She filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission and in early 1998 was told she had a good case and should hire her own attorney.
The case went to trial and a federal jury awarded her $3.8 million, but because of awards caps she netted only $360,000. Goodyear appealed and won so she took it to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost in a 4-5 decision in May 2007.
Justice Samuel Alito, she said, agreed that she was discriminated against but ruled against her on a technicality — she missed the 180-day deadline to file a complaint (unwittingly, by about 19 years).
But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg urged her to take the fight to Congress, and she did. In January 2009, the newly inaugurated President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law.
She recalled news crews wanting to interview her in her home during the fight, and wanting her to get out a mixer and make a cake or boil some tea in the role of the classic housewife. It was suggested the ignorant crews wanted to put her in her place, and she agreed.
To this day, she said, she still doesn’t know who gave her the note, and she doesn’t buy Goodyear tires.
Asked during a Q&A session how to keep moving the cause forward, she said to get more women and minorities into government and on corporate boards. Elect people who know how to work across the aisle and not fester in partisan divides.
Before the lecture ended and folks moved out into to hall for a book signing, she closed with a rallying cry: “Go get equal pay for equal work!”
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