Lilly Ledbetter Fought the Bastards – And Won for All of Us

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Nearly all social progress in our country has been spurred by unheralded “nobodies” like Lilly Ledbetter.

Forget the cartoonish “Great Man” version of American history. Nearly all social progress in our country has been spurred by unheralded “nobodies” who felt a sting of injustice and resolved to right the wrong.

Lilly Ledbetter, who recently died at 86, was one such trailblazing rebel. It’s worth remembering her gutsy stand for “paycheck fairness.” After 20 years as a supervisor at Goodyear Tire in Gadsden, Alabama, Ledbetter was stunned in 1998 to learn that she had routinely been paid about 40% less than men doing the same job — robbing her of some $200,000. She promptly sued Goodyear for backpay — and won. Justice!

But Goodyear unleashed a pack of lawyers to drag Ledbetter through spirit-sucking years of legal appeals, including to the Supreme Court. There, Justice Samuel Alito, the far-right judicial extremist, absurdly decreed that she should have filed her claim of sex discrimination when it first started 20 years prior. Never mind that she had no way of knowing back then that she was being gouged, Alito is not one to let reality interfere with his political agenda. So, she lost.

But sometimes you win by losing. Stung by the injustice, Ledbetter became a modern-day Mother Jones, launching a fiery national campaign for workplace fairness. Backed by women’s groups and labor, her tenacious organizing finally compelled Washington to enact the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, eliminating the sex discrimination loophole exploited by the likes of Alito and Goodyear.

Ledbetter never got a penny of the money the system cheated her out of, but with the passage of this law, she rightly said, “I have an even richer reward.” Yes … and so does America.

Yes, the System is Rigged Against the Working Class

A lot of working stiffs today say the system is rigged to keep them from getting ahead. One thing that might make them feel like that is this: The system is rigged against them!

Consider some very hard workers busting their butts going up and down our residential streets — Amazon’s army of delivery drivers, hauling tons of packages right to our doorsteps. Their exhausting, corporate-mandated hustle is a key source of Amazon’s enormous profits — making Amazon boss Jeff Bezos a cartoonishly rich global playboy.

Yet Bezos — whose entire career has been built on rigging the system against employees, competitors and taxpayers — even refuses to acknowledge that those hundreds of thousands of drivers work for him. He disavows them because many are attempting to unionize over the autocratic and abusive working conditions he imposes on them — including having such dehumanizing delivery schedules that drivers can’t even stop to pee. They commonly carry bottles so they can “go on the go.”

Not my problem, says Jeff, pointing to a perverse, corporate-written gotcha in American labor law. It rigs the system by letting Amazon contract with thousands of local front groups called DSPs — “delivery service partners.” They then hire drivers to deliver Amazon’s packages. This lets Bezos deny responsibility for how the workers are treated since, technically, he doesn’t employ them.

Cute, huh? Worse, his DSP ruse further rigs the system by proclaiming that unions cannot even try to organize Amazon itself. Instead, they must go place to place, trying to organize each of the 3,000 DSP fronts that provide Amazon’s workforce.

These legalistic manipulations disempower workers, enrich bosses and enforce the Corporate Golden Rule: “Those who have the gold, rule.”

Jim Hightower
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