Employment Discrimination

•    How much money do your male co-workers make? You probably don’t know and that information is probably not accessible. Too Bad. Unless you find out within 180 days of hiring or your last pay raise, there will be little you can do if you’ve been cheated by your employer. By then, most of you would have just found the water cooler! And now there wouldn’t be any time left to get your bearings straight and succeed in that first plum assignment, because the court expects you to conduct an undercover investigation to determine if your pay rate is fair. In Ledbetter v. Goodyear, the court ruled to ban women from filing employment discrimination law suits outside the 180 days time limit, making it harder for women to receive equal pay for equal work. Women are paid an average of 77 cents for every dollar men are paid. In this decision, the court makes it clear that equal pay is not a priority.

•    In Long Island Care at Home v. Coke, the Supreme Court unanimously denied minimum wage and overtime pay for health care workers that care for our elderly, disabled, sick and injured. The ruling left 2.1 million workers, mostly women, vulnerable to receive low wages and inadequate employee benefits.

Women’s Health

•    You wake up sick, with nausea, a headache and aches and pains. You reach for the phone and face a difficult question. Do you call your doctor or your Senator? Most would call their doctor. So then why did the Supreme Court put legislators, instead of doctors, in control of women’s health? The Supreme Court upheld the nation’s first abortion procedure ban—a ban on an intact dilation and evacuation abortion procedure that does not include an exception for women’s health. Ignoring a precedent left by Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court is now making medical decisions---not the doctor and the patient. The politically driven decision disregards medical evidence and opinions from the nation’s leading doctors, obstetricians and gynecologists. Furthermore, the law’s vague language has left several questions as to whether various other types of abortion procedures have been outlawed. The options women have are quickly diminishing since doctors are being forced to shy away from procedures that may be perfectly legal out of fear of prosecution.

The decision has also given fuel to conservative lawmakers. Since the ruling, legislators in Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Iowa, Missouri and Georgia have introduced several anti-choice initiatives ranging from harsher penalties for physicians breaking the new law to requiring abortion providers to offer ultrasounds to women before an abortion procedure. This decision is part of the anti-abortion movement’s plan to slowly whittle away reproductive rights. Gonzales v. Carhart is a dangerous precedent that opens the door for overturning Roe while resurrecting outdated paternalistic attitudes that assume women cannot make informed choices on their own.

Race and Segregation

•    Remember Brown v. Board of Education? A victory for the civil rights movement. This landmark decision opened the door for full equality and required black and white children to go to the same schools. In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, the new court gutted this monumental ruling. Race can no longer be used to achieve school integration. Never mind precedent. Never mind that previously the Supreme Court unanimously held that integration prepares students to live in today’s pluralistic society. Never mind that today 1 in 6 black children still attend schools that are 99 to 100 percent minority. Never mind that the achievement gap between white and black students continues to be present.