The Supreme Court issued a 5 to 4 decision on 5/29/2007 addressing the time for filing a claim alleging discrimination in pay under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It ruled that even though the unequal pay may be received with each new paycheck, the statute of limitations on filing a claim begins to run when the alleged illegal pay discrimination first occurred.
Lilly Ledbetter, a female tire plant employee, sued her employer, Goodyear, for allegedly paying her a smaller salary than it paid her male co-workers. In accordance with the statute of limitations, Ledbetter filed her charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) within 180 days of her most recent allegedly discriminatory annual employee evaluation. But at trial she was permitted to introduce evidence of many years’ worth of annual employee evaluations and respective raises to show that she had been continually subject to disparate pay because of her sex. The Eleventh Circuit held that this was improper because “in the search for an improperly motivated, affirmative decision directly affecting the employee’s pay, the employee may reach outside the limitations period created by her EEOC charge no further [than] the last such decision immediately preceding the start of the limitations period.”
The Supreme Court ruled that an employee must file a charge with the EEOC within 180 days after the alleged unlawful employment practice occurred. The majority differentiated between acts that are intentionally discriminatory, such as pay decisions, and acts that are nondiscriminatory and that entail adverse effects resulting from the past discrimination. Even if a past discriminatory act has current effects, a charge must be filed within 180 days of the discriminatory act, not its effects.
The majority also differentiated this case from cases where an employer uses a discriminatory pay structure. In that circumstance, each paycheck constitutes a new discriminatory act, but there is no general rule that a regular paycheck triggers a new period in which to charge discrimination for conduct that occurred long ago.
This is a significant decision that helps insure that complaints about workplace discrimination are handled promptly, as Congress intended.