Way To Go Obama

I never thought I would say that, and this may be the only time in Obama’s presidency that I do, but he did a good job today.

The first bill he signed into law as president eased the restrictions on filing wage discrimination lawsuits. It’s about time someone did something about this.

I was outraged in 2007 when the Supreme Court said that Lily Ledbetter had missed her chance to file a wage discrimination lawsuit, even though she only learned about the disparity between her pay and her male colleagues pay toward the end of her 19-year career with Goodyear Tire & Rubber.

The problem with the Supreme Court’s decision was their insistence that a person could only file a lawsuit within six-months of the original date the company paid one person more than another doing the same job. The six-month limit applied, even if the person who was paid less didn’t know they were being paid less. Talk about blind justice. Most companies prohibit employees from discussing their pay rates, and you can bet that the company isn’t going to say anything. The new law says that each new paycheck where a person is paid less than their peers opens a new six-month window to file a discrimination claim.

Ex-President Bush and Republicans from the last session of Congress said that this new law would primarily benefit trial lawyers and lead to a flood of lawsuits and huge awards against corporate America. Even if that were true, which it isn’t (since the law only allows payment for two-years worth of lost wages), I think most Americans would rather see companies forced to pay equal pay for equal work, than to continue paying the executives of these companies billions of dollars in bonuses, while they ride roughshod over the worker bees. Women currently earn about 78% of what their male counterparts are paid. If companies pay out a few discrimination claims, maybe the stockholders will revolt against corrupt management practices and replace the bloated executives and Board of Directors that contributed to the need for lawsuits in the first place.

It seems to me that corporate America’s interpretation of Trickle-Down Economics is that the people at the top take everything they can stuff into their pockets, and whatever they can’t grab, will eventually trickle down to the stockholders and employees who are paid by the hour.

That leads me to the second “”good job” for President Obama today. When news came out those Wall Street beneficiaries of the taxpayer’s Bailout Billions spent $18.4 billion in bonuses to themselves last year, Obama called their actions “shameful.” While that’s putting it mildly, at least it puts the bankers on notice that they might have to be more accountable for questionable business decisions in the future.

It’s incomprehensible that many of the Wall Street executives, whose failed policies led to the country’s financial meltdown, are still at the helm of their respective companies. Sadly, the government still looks to these people as the “professionals” who can lead us out of this financial crisis.

I look forward to the day when stockholders demand that when any company gets off track, layoffs begin at the top and work down through the ranks. There’s no way a company should cut 50,000 hard-working employees while paying their CEO $84 million a year.