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Palin's Run For President Is Huge Setback For Women's Rights

I read the other day in the New York Times that Sarah Palin is considering a run for President – and I have been trying to figure out why it makes me so angry -- other than the fact that I have to listen to her most irritating voice and garbled grammar for the many campaign months ahead.

I know it’s because she’s a woman and because she embodies a major setback to so much I have worked for over the past 30 plus years, but I’m struggling with what really makes me feel this visceral negativity. And I'm not the only one.

Is it simply because of where she stands on the issues -- her harmful views on a woman’s right to choose that would take us back to the dark and dangerous days before Roe v Wade?

Is it because she was against the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and thought it was ok for a woman with no knowledge that she was a victim of  wage discrimination to be barred from bringing a lawsuit when she first learned about it?

Is it because she touts equal pay for women but takes positions against the Paycheck Fairness Act which would help ensure that women really do get the equal pay they deserve?

Is it because she’s against government programs to help women with issues like affordable child care – concerns which deeply affect working women and for which the US is light years behind other countries?

Is it because she thought it was ok to promote a sexual harasser to her cabinet?

Or is it because she is simply unqualified?

What everyone knows but barely anyone talks about is that Sarah Palin is where she is because she is pretty. As  Todd Purdham noted in his Vanity Fair article about Palin, her beauty queen looks have

captivated people who would never have given someone with Palin’s record a second glance if Palin had looked like Susan Boyle.

Susan Reimer , from the Baltimore Sun put it this way:

Put red high heels and red lipstick on a woman with a cute figure and run her out there and we promise, nobody will notice her mangled syntax or her poor sense of geography.

Unqualified women who get ahead simply because of their looks make it that much harder for intelligent, capable women to get a fair shake. Is it possible that beneath all of the chatter, it’s this harsh reality that makes feminists so upset?

There is no doubt, that for those of us who have long championed equal rights for women, Sarah Palin represents a gigantic step backwards --- and going backwards after the many hard fought struggles to get ahead is always rough. She got where she did simply because of her looks and she rejects policies which would improve the lives of women.

Simply put, for so many women, this major league anti-feminist is just really hard to take.

image: turbo.inquisitr.com

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As Congress ended its last session, a legislative victory for employee rights advocates came with it.

The bill, signed by President Obama at the end of December,  came about because of the horrible story involving Jamie Leigh Jones. Here's one description of what happened as reported in September by  Think Progress:

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad. In an apparent attempt to cover up the incident, the company then put her in a shipping container for at least 24 hours without food, water, or a bed, and “warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.”

Even more insultingly, the DOJ resisted bringing any criminal charges in the matter. KBR argued that Jones’ employment contract warranted her claims being heard in private arbitration — without jury, judge, public record, or transcript of the proceedings. After 15 months in arbitration, Jones and her lawyers went to court to fight the KBR claims. Yesterday, a court ruled in favor of Jones.

The tragedy spurred the bill which became known as both  the "Franken Amendment" and the"Jamie Leigh Jones Amendment" (to the Defense Appropriations Act for 2010) . It's the first federal legislation that prevents employees from forcing binding arbitration on their employees as a forum for resolving employment disputes.

In recent years, many companies have required employees to sign contracts, handbooks, and other documents which require them to go to arbitration to resolve their employment disputes.

When employees sign -- which they are forced to do to either get the job or keep the job -- they give up their right to take claims against their employers to court. Cases involving discrimination and sexual harassment, to name a few, are compelled to go to arbitration instead.

An arbitration is generally held before three arbitrators and is commonly  viewed as a favorable forum for employers versus employees.

Without binding arbitration, employees have the right to take their discrimination cases to court, and with sufficient evidence, in front of a jury. It is this precious right to a jury trial which is at the heart of this issue.

The Franken Amendment prohibits the award of Department of Defense contracts of over one million dollars to any company that forces its employees or independent contractors to submit to pre-dispute binding arbitration of Title VII and sexual assault-related tort claims

Under the bill, defense contractors:

• with over $1 million (which is most) that are funded by 2010 appropriations will not be able to force arbitration of Title VII and sexual assault-related tort claims
  

• will not be able to enter into forced arbitration agreements with their employees or independent contractors or enforce any agreements that have such provisions.

The list of covered sexual assault-related tort claims covers:

any tort related to or arising out of sexual assault or harassment, including assault and battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, false imprisonment, or negligent hiring, supervision, or retention

The Franken Amendment will protect hundreds of thousands of employees around the country from being forced to arbitrate their Title VII claims. It also provides persuasive authority for employee advocates to strike down forced arbitration clauses in other federal contracts.

It's also a step forward to getting rid of forced arbitration in other employment settings.

All in all, it's a great victory on a critical issue for employee advocates and we thank Senator Franken for his efforts on behalf of employee rights.

image: bsmith101.files.wordpress.com

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Age Discrimination Legislation Will Overturn Gross Decision

Last June, the Supreme Court issued the awful and controversial age discrimination opinion in the Gross v. FBL Financial Services case.

I wrote about the case at that time and predicted that it was just a matter of time until Congress fixed it with a bill that would overrule the decision and set the record straight on the fair standard of proof for age discrimination plaintiffs.

Last Tuesday, the Senate and House introduced legislation designed to do just that.

The bill -- introduced as H.R. 3721 -- and called the Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimation Act, will put age discrimination plaintiffs back where they were before the Gross decision.

The bill will apply to all cases pending on or after June 17, 2009,  the day before the Gross decision.

Senator Patrick Leahy, one of the authors of the bill had this to say (as reported in the New York Times):

What our bill does is restore the intent of Congress, an intent that I believe the Supreme Court negligently ignored.

In Gross, the Court held that the Plaintiff, Jack Gross, was required to prove that age was the “but for” reason he was demoted from his job.

In other words, the plaintiff would have to prove that “but for" his age, he would not have been demoted (fired, hired, etc.).

Most interpret this as a new and more stringent requirement that age be the sole reason for the adverse employment action (though the case has conflicting language on that issue).

What's fundamentally flawed about the Court's interpretation of the federal age discrimination statute (ADEA) is that it's not consistent with all  of the other comparable civil rights statutes.

Simply stated, it makes no sense for an age discrimination plaintiff to be treated differently, and more harshly, than a plaintiff in a race or gender discrimination case. The method of proof and standard of proof has been, and ought to be, the same.

In other discrimination cases a plaintiff must prove that the alleged discrimination was "a motivating factor," not the  sole reason, for the challenged adverse employment decision.

This bill establishes that age discrimination cases are to be interpreted by the same "motivating factor" standard of proof.

The bill also explicitly recognizes the difficulty of proving discrimination cases and makes clear that victims of any kind of prohibited discrimination can prove their cases with direct or circumstantial evidence.

According to Senator Tom Harkin, one of the co-sponsors of the bill -- as reported in Workforce Management:

The Court invented a new standard that makes it prohibitively difficult for a victim to prove age discrimination

This extraordinarily high burden radically undermines older workers’ ability to hold employers accountable.

It’s no secret that workers over 55 have been hit hard by the recession. According to the EEOC, 25,000 age discrimination cases were filed last year, a 30%increase from 2000.

The last thing these folks need is a more difficult standard of proof when age discrimination is at play.

Fortunately, Congress has the final say on what its legislation means and how it should be interpreted. That’s why it gets to say that all discrimination plaintiffs should be treated consistently by the courts.

Let’s hope that this important Congressional fix gets passed soon.
 

image:blog.prospect.org   images1.wikia.nocookie.net

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I was both surprised and amused when I read this piece in the New York Times about  the French way of handling labor troubles.

According to what's reported, at least three times in recent weeks workers in France have held their bosses hostage in order to get management  to accede to their demands.

Last week workers at a Caterpillar plant in the French Alps held five of their bosses in a dispute over their severance packages. Pierre Piccarreta, a French union representative, justified the conduct this way :

“There is no violence or sequestration, but simply pressure so they restart negotiations . . . .At a time when the company is making a profit and distributing dividends to shareholders we want to find a favorable outcome for all the workers and know as quickly as possible where we are going.

The same type of hostage taking occurred at two other French plants in recent weeks:

• Workers at a 3M plant held their boss for more than 24 hours at a plant in Central France.

• Workers at a Sony plant in southwest France held their boss overnight when they were trying to get better severance packages.

France has  a long history of labor militancy and as reported in the Times has become increasingly restless as the impact of the global economic crisis worsens . The French unemployment rate rose to 8.3 percent in February, according to the European Union.

It certainly struck me as an interesting contrast to the way we do things in America.

It's no secret that we are in a hot debate over the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. The bill provides a bypass to the traditional union election process and allows for a certified bargaining unit if a majority of workers sign cards indicating their support for a union.

The bill would also provide stiffer penalties against employers for intimidation and retaliation of union organizers.

Labor suffered a real blow this past week when Senator Arlen Spector backed out of his support for the bill.  Another hurdle came came from Senator Diane Feinstein, a past sponsor of the act. Citing the flailing economy as a reason, her office issued a statement indicating she would seek alternative legislation that was less divisive.

There are many compelling reasons for the bill and it still has lots of support. One example is the excellent editorial by David Freiboth in Friday's Seattle Times who wrote:

The debate over pending labor-law reform, the Employee Free Choice Act, is getting mired in concerns about an employee's role in democratic determinism, thereby missing the larger economic issue that drives the real issue. Scare tactics that highlight problems with union intimidation during organizing campaigns are just that — scare tactics — designed to subvert the essence of the issue.

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