Our Disgusting Government in Action
Supreme Court action on employment discrimination law. In a case of clear cut pay discrimination, Goodyear Tire Co. was able to get out of being held responsible for their discrimination against women because the woman who filed the suit did not file the suit within 180 days of the original decision to pay her substantially less than men with the same experience were making for the same job. Of course, since she didn’t find out how much less she was making than the men at the company until she had already been there for 19 years, it would have been impossible to file within the 180 day time frame.
The 5-4 majority in the case said they made their decision not on the basis of what they thought was right, but on their reading of the law as written. Justice Ginsberg read a dissent from the bench calling on congress to fix the law.
Now, one would think that this is a no-brainer. If companies are discriminating against employees on the basis of gender or race or what not, then they are breaking the law and should be held accountable. Since companies don’t generally publish everyone’s salaries, it may well take some time for a person to realize that they are being paid less for the same work and even more time to figure out if this is a pattern. And hopefully, we don’t all walk into the workplace trying to figure out if we were offered an appropriate salary or if we’re being screwed. However, congress couldn’t put together a bill to fix this blazingly obvious problem with the law as it now stands.
F’ing ridiculous. These money grubbing son-of-a-guns don’t give a rat’s behind about the people they are supposed to be representing. They refuse to fix even the most elemental of problems. I’m probably too cynical, but I think this might be the first presidential election of my adult life that I don’t cast a vote in. Personally, I have just lost faith in our government. I can think of literally dozens of examples off the top of my head where everyone from the average joe to the think-tank eggheads have a decent idea of what we ought to be doing – from farm subsidies to ethanol to money for oil companies to health insurance to torture to this sort of stuff. But the good men and women who have been elected to represent us can’t pull their heads out of the money pots someone’s shoved up their behinds long enough to do the right things. It has probably been a decade since congress has done one thing that mattered, much less gotten it right.
What was that old Thomas Jefferson wrote back when – “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, – That whenever any Form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” So, really, how many of us have consented to this crap? If someone could think of a way to actually clean the cesspool that is Washington DC out, I’d be on board.
Pass It On!
#politics #politicians #supremecourt #morons #congress #idiots #employmentlaw