MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
An unlikely champion for workplace equality has died. Back in 1998, Lilly Ledbetter was getting ready to retire from the Goodyear Tire Company after nearly 20 years on the job. She was a supervisor at the Goodyear Plant in Gadsen, Alabama. And one day, she found a note in her mailbox at work.
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LILLY LEDBETTER: Someone slipped me an anonymous note showing my name with three males that we four were doing the exact same job, and the base pay - mine was drastically different than theirs.
MARTIN: The note revealed she had been underpaid for nearly two decades.
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LEDBETTER: When I saw that, it took my breath away. I felt humiliated. I felt degraded.
MARTIN: She filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC. The following year, she sued Goodyear and won.
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LEDBETTER: And we got to trial in January of 2003. That's when the verdict came back - 3.8 million in my favor. Of course, that was reduced immediately to a $300,000 cap and $60,000 back pay.
MARTIN: An appellate court then reversed the decision, and the Supreme Court upheld that reversal, deciding that employers cannot be sued for wage discrimination more than six months after the discrimination occurs. Ledbetter never saw a dime in compensation, but she kept fighting. In 2009, Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, effectively nullifying the high court's decision. Barack Obama signed it into law.
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BARACK OBAMA: If we stay focused as Lilly did and keep standing for what's right, as Lilly did, we will close that pay gap.
MARTIN: I spoke with her a couple of weeks after that bill's signing, and Ledbetter told me she hoped her story would be a wake-up call for other women in the workplace.
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LEDBETTER: I would like to tell the young women who are out there working to be aware of what's happening to them in their job and to keep their goals set high and to strive to achieve them.
MARTIN: Women working full-time, year-round, now make, on average, 84 cents for every dollar that men make. That's according to the U.S. Department of Labor. But because of Ledbetter's advocacy, it's easier for workers now to fight for equal pay. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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