Last week, I watched the movie Lilly, which is the story of Lilly Ledbetter and the struggle to require equal pay for women. The movie reminded me just how awful the political influence of the American Oligarchy often is. The movie also reminded me that when we stick together, we can defeat the oligarchs.
Underpaid Because She Was a Woman
Lilly Ledbetter worked for 19 years at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber
plant in Gadsden Alabama. She became a supervisor but was always paid
substantially less than men with similar responsibilities. She was fired
shortly before reaching 20 years of service, and she sued Goodyear in the
federal courts for back pay and punitive damages. She won her case in the
district court, but the decision was reversed by the Circuit Court and then by
the Supreme Court.
Justice Denied on a Technicality
The decision was reversed on appeal on the grounds that the law
requires that a lawsuit for redress of a discriminatory act must be made within
180 days of the act. The Supreme Court held that the act of discrimination was the
initial decision to pay her less than the men, and that act had occurred many
years earlier than the lawsuit. So, the suit was invalid.
The problem with this logic is that an employee generally
does not know what other employees are being paid. Companies do not publish
that information, and people generally do not talk about their paychecks. Lilly
had obtained the information only because a sympathetic colleague slipped it to
her secretly when she was developing the lawsuit. In her dissent from the
court’s decision, Justice Ginsberg argued that the initial decision to pay
Lilly less than her male colleagues were paid was not the only act of
discrimination. On the contrary, each unequal paycheck should be considered a
separate act of discrimination, but Ginsburg’s reasoning was defeated in a 5 to
4 decision by the Supreme Court. Thus, the court denied Lilly justice on the
grounds that at the time that she was first underpaid, she did not complain.
The Court ignored the fact that she did not then know and could not have known
that her pay was less than that of her colleagues. One could hardly ask for a better demonstration of the role of the Supreme Court as the preserver of the privileges of the American Oligarchy.
Changing the Law
Since the courts offered no redress for the injustice that Lilly had suffered, the action shifted to Congress where an effort was made by Democrats to change the law that the courts had relied on to deny justice to Lilly. The American oligarchs opposed the change of course because paying women fairly might make a dent in the oligarch's profits. Their lobbying group the National Chamber of Commerce pushed the Republican Party to mount a full-court press to defeat the Democratic effort to make the law more just. Big corporations all over the country were afraid that they would be hit by lawsuits alleging pay discrimination. The oligarchs spent millions of dollars to defend their right to discriminate against women by paying them less than men. They were at first successful in their campaign to avoid paying women fairly. The Democrats' bill was defeated in Congress in 2007, but by a quirk of fate, Barak Obama and the Democrats won control of the government in the election of 2008, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was passed in 2009.
The Oligarchy Continues to Oppose Justice for Working Americans
Today, we see a similar fight playing out in Congress again.
This time the fight is over the subsidies that help citizens afford the health
insurance that they purchase through the marketplace set up under the
Affordable Care Act. The subsidies were instituted during the Covid pandemic,
and they are set to expire at the end of this year. The Democrats are pushing
to extend the subsidies, and the Republicans oppose the extension. Again,
Democrats are pushing to make our society just a little more just, while the
Republicans oppose that change. The party opposes the change because it will
have to be paid for through taxes, and the oligarchs generally opposes
taxation that might minimally reduce their profits.
The Evil of the Oligarchy
The oligarchs oppose any change that would use the
resources of government to make life better for working Americans. They fight
even small changes like the continuing the subsidies for people’s health
insurance. They do so because they know that the real issue is the preservation of their profits and of their power to use our government to their advantage. The real issue is who shall have a say. Should
our country be governed by its people or by a small, wealthy oligarchy?
Should the wealth of our great country be used to make our people’s lives
better, or should it be used to make a small, wealthy minority even wealthier?
Hope for the Future
The American Oligarchs are powerful, but they are not omnipotent. The lesson of Lilly Ledbetter's case is that there is hope for the future because elections really matter. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act passed in the end because its supporters won the elections of 2008. Today again we are faced with a government controlled by the oligarchs, and today again we have an opportunity to take back control by winning the elections of 2026 and 2028. The control of Congress by the oligarchs rests on their fragile coalition with the MAGA voters, and that coalition is splintering as we saw in the recent special elections in several parts of the country.
We have an opportunity to take back our country. Let's not waste it. Now is the time for all of us to work to elect candidates for Congress who will truly represent us.
