Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009

Floor Speech

LILLY LEDBETTER FAIR PAY ACT OF 2009 -- (Senate - January 22, 2009)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. BENNETT of Utah. Mr. President, I rise to comment with respect to the proposed Lilly Ledbetter legislation, and I bring the perspective of a small employer, for I have presided over firms with as few as half a dozen employees. I have been fortunate enough to see some of those firms grow to larger firms. Indeed, one f irm I joined as the fourth employee in the history of that firm ended up listed on the New York Stock Exchange. So I have seen the travails employers go through as they deal with growth situations and creating jobs. The company with which I was involved grew from the original four employees to a staff of 4,000.

One of the challenges that comes with a company that is growing that rapidly and creating that number of jobs is you are always involved with change. You are always involved with uncertainty. It is not the same thing as presiding over a company that has been established for 60 or 70 years and has a degree of stability. Every month is a new adventure, a new challenge, and you are constantly changing your employee base. As new people are hired, the old people sometimes get resentful of the new people and say: We were here at the beginning; why aren't we getting these promotions? And you have to explain to them that the company has changed and we need new talents, we need to bring on board new skills, and, quite frankly, the small group that was with us in the beginning has to be augmented with new people.

There are resentments, there are concerns, and occasionally there are discrimination cases filed.

But if we were to take the position of the underlying legislation that says if there was genuine wage discrimination in a circumstance, everyone who was involved in writing a paycheck after that discrimination has committed the discrimination again and has effectively reset the clock for the statut e of limitations.

As I consider the impact of this on a business, I realize this, in a way, is the asbestos fight all over again. We saw in the asbestos fight companies that were taken down for actions that occurred outside the company on the part of those who worked in other companies that were acquired decades later. Let's put it specifically.

Let's assume a business had a situation where there was, in fact, wage discrimination that took place. The individual against whom this discrimination was p racticed did nothing with respect to it but continued to stay employed and continued to receive the paycheck.

Under the Lilly Ledbetter legislation, the clock would be reset for the statute of limitations. The individual who performed the discrimination, let us say, was discharged. The individual who supervised the situation was unaware that discrimination had occurred. The company in which it happened is later acquired by another company. And then the trial lawyers discover this had been going on years ago. They now sue the eventual company that acquired the first company for a great amount of money, perhaps even a class action suit is filed. You cannot prove what happened because all the people involved have disappeared. They have gone away. They no longer work for the company. They have no memory of what happened. It is decades later.

It doesn't matter. Under this legislation, the statute of limitations that is crafted to deal with a situation where there are no available witnesses anymore somehow magically, by virtue of this bill, keeps getting set again and again going forward.

The Supreme Court got this one right. The attempt on the part of those who want to curry favor with the trial lawyers have got this wrong. What will happen? Will more people who have had wage discrimination receive benefits? There is no guarantee that will happen. Will trial lawyers who are looking for causes of action receive fees? There is a pretty good guarantee that will happen. Will small and medium-size businesses that cannot afford legal fees be faced with enormous settlement charges? I am pretty sure that will happen. Will jobs be destroyed as a result of this, as they were in the asbestos case? I guarantee that will happen.

Here we are, in the worst financial situation any of us can recall, talking about a circumstance that would destroy jobs among small busin esses and that would discourage employers who are struggling to create new jobs in medium-size businesses. We are talking about putting out billions of dollars in the name of a stimulus while simultaneously discussing legislation that would destroy jobs and create chaos among those who are trying to survive in this financial circumstance.

This is bad legislation on its face and bad legislation on its merits. But the timing of this proposal is atrocious. To be making these kinds of proposals in thi s kind of financial circumstance is incomprehensible to me, unless I assume that there are those who say the trial lawyers played an important part in the election; the trial lawyers need to be rewarded for the important part they played in the election; let's have a bill that will line the pockets of the trial lawyers and look the other way in terms of the economic consequences.

I compared this to the asbestos litigation. I was in the Chamber when we dealt with what are called strike suits, where trial lawyers would file lawsuits on behalf of clients who were, in fact, not aggrieved but were simply posing in behalf of a class that the trial lawyer himself had put together.

We passed that legislation. It was vetoed by President Clinton. It was the only Clinton veto that was overridden in this Chamber, as everyone was outraged at the behavior of the trial lawyers who brought these strike suits.

There are those who said: Oh, you still don't get it, you who are picking on the trial lawyers. They do w onderful things. I agree that the ability to file a grievance and have a trial lawyer carry it forward, even in a class-action suit, is a protection the American people need. But these lawyers were going far beyond anything that was good for the American people.

The position was summarized by Bill Lerach, known as the ``king of the trial bar,'' when he said: I have the ideal law practice. I have no clients. He is now in jail because his practices finally caught up with him, as it was finally demonstrate d that the people on whose behalf he was suing were, in fact, not real clients. They were paid by him to pose as people who were aggrieved.

We saw those kinds of abuses that came out of that situation. We finally saw his law firm destroyed, and this man, and others like him from the trial bar, went to jail for their activities.

Let's not create another circumstance where there is a temptation to once again take advantage of people who have been legitimately hurt, but by manipulating the law in such a way as to maximize the return to the plaintiff's bar, we see the economy hurt.

The Supreme Court, as I say, got this one right. We should stay with the Supreme Court decision and not try to give special advantage to a special group simply because of their activities in the last election.

I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source