Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Back to Opinion

Top Court Splits Five vs. Four Again

In a decision on wage discrimination, the U.S. Supreme Court divided five to four along predictable lines. There are five conservatives and four liberals.

The case involves a woman who is a supervisor at a Goodyear tire plant in Gadsden, Alabama. She is the sole female supervisor. She was paid less than the other supervisors, including supervisors who were hired after she was.

After twenty years of employment at the same job, she concluded that she had had enough. She filed a formal complaint with the government. The case moved from court to court until it reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court ruled that the complaint was invalid because the aggrieved party filed her complaint too late. For the complaint to be valid, it had to be filed within 180 days after the original wage was set.

The court’s decision affects far more people than the woman in the Goodyear case. Between 2001 and 2006, some 40,000 workers have brought discrimination suits. Just how many know of the 180-day rule, we do not know.

But we have a suspicion that we would like to share with our readers. When the law was drafted giving workers the right to sue their employers for wage discrimination, there was a shrewd legislator who did not like the law to begin with but who did not want to go on record as voting against an act empowering workers to institute suits against employers for wage discrimination. So, he (or she) voted for the bill but tacked on the 180-day clause with the expectation that it would be a rare worker who knew about this little obscure requirement..

Apparently, four members of the U.S. Supreme Court realized that the 180-day clause was a trap and did not deserve the blessing of the court. But they were outvoted by the other five members.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.