Maetta Vance, an African American catering assistant at Ball State University, came to the Supreme Court a few years ago with a se of on-the-job racial harassment. Vance said a white woman who directed her work on a daily basis used racist words around her, including `Buckwheat' and `Sambo,' and laughed while her husband and daughter taunted Vance with racial epithets. The woman also slapped her face for no reason, Vance said, and later asked her, `Are you scared?' Vance said a different woman in the department bragged about her family's connections to the Ku Klux Klan and called her a `porch monkey.'
"The Court threw out Vance's case, by a 5-4 vote. Vance's lawsuit against Ball State required her to show that the woman who harassed her was her supervisor, but the five conservative judges said she had not done so. As long as the woman could not do things like fire or demote her, the Court said, Ball State owed her nothing. The decision was a clear misreading of the law, and one that bore no relation to how workplaces operate in the real world. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the liberal dissenter, said a worker who directs another worker's daily activities is, of course, a supervisor. She also warned that the Court's decision would make it harder to `prevent discrimination from infecting the nation's workplaces.'
"Jack Gross, an Iowa insurance executive, had a similar difficulty with the Court a few years earlier.He was one of a group of high-performing workers over the age of fifty who were demoted by his company on the same day. Gross was forced to hand his responsibilities over to a younger worker he supervised. A jury ruled that he had been a victim of age discrimination and awarded him damages.
"The Court overturned th jury's verdict, again by a 5-4 vote. Gross met the standard of proof required in race and sex discrimination cases. The Court decided, however, that victims of age discrimination had a higher burden of proof, even though federal laws against race, sex, and age discrimination used identical language. The dissenting liberal justices accused the majority of `unabashed... judicial lawmaking.'
"The there was Lilly Ledbetter. Ledbetter was a manager at Goodyear Tire & Rubber's plant in Gadsden, Alabama, where for years she was paid far less than the male managers. She had no way of knowing that she was underpaid, because the plant's salaries were secret, until one day she got an anonymous note telling her. Ledbetter sued for sex discrimination, and a jury ruled in her favor and awarded her damages.
"The Court reversed the jury's verdict, again by a 5-4 vote, with the most irrational reasoning of all. It said Ledbetter had made her claim of discrimination too late. She would have had to file it, the Court said, within 180 days of when Goodyear decided to pay her a discriminatory wage. It did not matter that, at the time, she had no way of knowing how much male managers earned. Ginsburg, in dissent, pointed out that the Court was requiring women suing for pay discrimination to do the impossible. The ruling against Ledbetter was so obviously unfair that Congress overturned it with the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first law Barack Obama signed as president.
"If it seems that the Court's five-justice conservative majority has been twisting the law to rule against employment discrimination victims, there is a simple reason: it has.The Court's battle against victims of on-the-job discrimination is, however, part of a much larger war. For five decades the Court has, with striking regularity, sided with the rich and powerful against the poor and weak, in virtually every area of law.
"In campaign finance law, it has opened the floodgates to money from wealthy individuals and corporations. In election law, it has upheld rules and practices designed to make it more difficult for the poor and racial minorities to vote, and struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act. In corporate law, the Court has made it harder for employees and consumers to sue when they are injured. In criminal law, it has favored prosecutors so consistently that it has contributed significantly to the nation's mass incarceration crisis. And on a wide variety of issues, the Court has ruled, often cruelly, against the poor."
