Supreme Court Leaves Loophole in the Pregnancy Discrimination Act
May 18, 2009
by Bruce Nahin
|The author is expressing his own views, not necessarily those of The New Agenda. To read more, see this AP Story. Dissenting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is quoted as saying, “Congress intended no continuing reduction of women’s compensation, pension benefits included, attributable to their placement on pregnancy leave.”
Women who took maternity leave before it became illegal to discriminate against pregnant women can’t sue to get their leave time to count for their pensions, the Supreme Court decided Monday. The high court overturned a lower court decision that said decades-old maternity leaves (some of which are 40 years old) should count in determining pensions.
Four AT&T Corp. employees who took maternity leave between 1968 and 1976 sued the company to get their leave time credited toward their pensions. Their pregnancies occurred before the 1979 Pregnancy Discrimination Act. That law prohibited companies from treating pregnancy leave differently than other types of leave.
AT&T lawyers said their pension plan was legal when the women took the pregnancy leave, so they shouldn’t have to recalculate their retirement benefits now, and thusly should be allowed to continue the discriminatory acts towards these elderly women. Congress did not make the Pregnancy Discrimination Act retroactive, they said, so the women should not get any extra money. The majority of the justices agreed, thus perpetuating decades-old discrimination that caused the passage of the act.
As with Ledbetter, I think it is time for Congress to amend the leave act to include this time period. It is for a group of women who are elderly and are in need of this earned benefit.
It is hard to disagree with the Courts legal reasoning here. Making the companies pay retroactively is an ex post facto law because it would retroactively punish them for doing something legal at the time. It is certainly wrong that these women were, at the time, but there is little that can be done now. Future legislation obviously should protect pregnant women, but Congress cannot pass an ex post facto law. SImple as that
PS: this is just nitpicking, but the 1st sentence is misleading; saying they “can’t sue” implies a lack of standind, which is incorrect. They can sue, they just won’t win
Rubbish. It would be ex post facto if companies were forced to reimburse the full pension amount underpayed to date. Not for them to begin now paying the correcly figured rate. When US law changed to declare the owning of slaves illegal, slaveholders were “punished” by losing their investment in the purchase of human beings. After all, it was legal at the time the sale was made. Was that an unfair or unconstitutional ruling?
*****A
There seems to be a couple ways of interpreting ex post facto in this case; I do hope that someone sues so that some precedent can be used to determine this and similar questions in the future.
“When US law changed to declare the owning of slaves illegal, slaveholders were “punished” by losing their investment in the purchase of human beings. After all, it was legal at the time the sale was made. Was that an unfair or unconstitutional ruling?”
Slavery was abolished by constitutional amendmenta nd not by a ruling of a court. The constitution is the supreme law of the land and must be obeyed at any cost.
The act of Congress do not if they are unconstitutional.
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