It’s a good day for feisty working women.

On January 6, I wrote about “Writing Wrongs the American Way” in connection with the travesty of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Lily Ledbetter case and the pending legislation intended to correct that wrong.  Well, today President Obama signs the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law.  In today’s New York Times, Gail Collins explains clearly and concisely the injustice Ledbetter suffered:

Ledbetter, now 70, spent years working as a plant supervisor at a tire factory in Alabama. How, when she neared retirement, someone slipped her a pay schedule that showed her male colleagues were making much more money than she was. A jury found her employer, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, to be really, really guilty of pay discrimination. But the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision led by the Bush appointees, threw out Ledbetter’s case, ruling that she should have filed her suit within 180 days of the first time Goodyear paid her less than her peers. (Let us pause briefly to contemplate the chances of figuring out your co-workers’ salaries within the first six months on the job.) Until the Supreme Court stepped in, courts generally presumed that the 180-day time limit began the last time an employee got a discriminatory pay check, not the first.

Ledbetter, unfortunately, will not benefit from the new law.  The Supreme Court decision in her case was a final judgment that cannot be undone.  But Collins does her some justice in celebrating her willingness to fight for her rights.  And I’m glad to see too that Collins recognizes the importance of lawyers in the fight for justice too:

It’s a good day for the feisty working women who went to court to demand their rights and the frequently underpaid lawyers who championed them. They’re strangers to one another; most of them made their stands and then returned to their ordinary lives. But they’re a special sorority all the same.