Lilly Ledbetter Discrimination

594 Words3 Pages

On 20th January 2009, Barack Obama took office as the 44th president of the United States of America, becoming the first African American President in the history of the United States of America, a country where just fifty years ago he would not have been allowed to vote because of his skin colour (Alexander, 2009 p.5). Barack Obama was a popular presidential candidate and according to Corey (2009) “Almost 67 million people had voted for Barack Obama, including some voters that had never voted before, resulting in the most votes a president had ever received so far” (p.40). When Barack Obama wont the election in November 2008, his supporters believed that there would be change and that years of war, global warming, economic difficulties and …show more content…

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act 2009 is named after a woman who discovered that the men at her workplace received higher pay for doing the exactly same job she was doing. Lilly Ledbetter then took her pay discrimination complaint all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 2007 that claims like hers had to be filed within 180 days of an employer’s decision to pay a worker less, even if the worker didn’t learn about the unfair pay until much later, as was the case for Mrs. Ledbetter. (Slack, 2012). When Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act 2009 he not only overturned the 2007 decision of the Supreme Court but he also made it easier for workers to challenge unequal pay. “United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (n.d)” advises “the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 overturned the Supreme Court 's decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Inc., 550 U.S. 618 (2007), which severely restricted the time period for filing complaints of employment discrimination concerning compensation.” Since the passage of the Act, according to Fox (2015) “courts have heard countless pay discrimination cases.” As a result of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, I believe Obama will be known in history as the president who attempted to close the wage gap between men and women in the