It's OK - Roberts has a Ouija board to summon her when necessary...
Posted on 02/25/2019 10:00:03 AM PST by bitt
The U.S. Supreme Court said judges “are appointed for life, not for eternity,” in setting aside a pay-discrimination ruling written by a jurist who died a week and a half before the decision was issued.
The unsigned opinion said a federal appeals court was wrong to count the vote of the late Judge Stephen Reinhardt in a ruling that let a female math consultant sue a California school official.
In letting the case go forward, the 11-judge appellate panel ruled unanimously but splintered in its reasoning. Reinhardt’s opinion said employers can’t pay female workers less than their male counterparts just because the women earned lower wages in their previous jobs.
Five fellow judges joined Reinhardt’s opinion, making it the appeals court’s controlling reasoning by a single vote.
“The upshot is that Judge Reinhardt’s vote made a difference,” the Supreme Court wrote. The high court’s order was issued without published dissent.
The appeals court ruling, issued April 9, 2018, contained a footnote that said the judges voted and finished their opinions before Reinhardt died more than a week earlier, on March 29.
The lawsuit turned on the U.S. Equal Pay Act, which permits pay disparities if they are based on a “factor other than sex.”
Fresno County Schools Superintendent Jim Yovino says those words leave room for policies that link pay to prior salary. The county’s policy is to pay new employees 5 percent more than they received in their previous job, an approach Yovino says is gender-neutral.
The math consultant, Aileen Rizo, was hired in 2009 at a starting salary of $62,133. She says she learned in a lunchroom conversation three years later that her three male colleagues all started at salaries more than $10,000 higher even though they do the same job.
In his appeal, Yovino contended Reinhardt’s vote shouldn’t have been counted, though the school official acknowledged the result probably won’t change without the late judge.
The case is Yovino v. Rizo, 18-272.
ping
also see
https://www.scotusblog.com/2019/02/one-new-grant-and-a-9th-circuit-rebuke/#more-283278
This could be bad for RBG.....
People actually wonder why a sensible, logical, successful, honest man like Trump was elected and is still popular.
The rest want him out because of the same reasons he is popular
This crap
LOL
Why not? Dems vote for eternity.
How did she vote on this?
Teachers are usually paid on a union scale. No guesswork needed. What did the other teachers do that made them worth $10k more than this lady?
...a pay-discrimination ruling written by a jurist who died a week and a half before the decision was issued... said employers can’t pay female workers less than their male counterparts just because the women earned lower wages in their previous jobs.
That gives me an idea...
And, it could set a dangerous precedent, or a good one...
Why not vacate the Roe v Wade decision? After all, those judges who made the decision a long time ago, are all dead. Should their have made a decision that remains for eternity?
Should we revisit decisions made a long time ago, that were made under different circumstances and under different times?
Fortunately we can still elect dead people to the Senate.
The men probably did nothing to warrant the extra $10,000.
A man sat at a bar, sadly nursing his scotch on the rocks. The bartender noticed and asked him what was wrong.
“I just learned by mom has become a registered Democrat.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. And the funeral was only last week!”
LOL
The judges know this. Exactly how, I don’t know.
It's OK - Roberts has a Ouija board to summon her when necessary...
They did a better job in salary negotiation!
The plaintiff was happy with her salary for 3 years. Then, after a lunchroom conversation, she decides that she was cheated.
She didn't have to accept the job.
Just a guess, but the story does say that the school district's policy is to pay new hires five percent more than they were making in their old jobs. If that's the factor in play, it suggests that the men were older and more experienced. Or perhaps they were lateral job switchers moving into teaching from careers in other fields where they were being paid more.
Issues like this can get very tricky very fast. I benefitted from this once, a couple of previous lives ago. It was a job I really wanted so I would have taken it anyhow, but the employer's policy was that they wanted people to show up on day one with a happy face. A salary bump from one's previous job was one way of institutionalizing this. I did not turn it down.
Prohibiting this kind of practice would have the effect of inhibiting lateral transfers and job switching, which always involves a risk. (This is one of the hard-to-measure attitudinal differences that probably contributes to male-female salary differentials. Men take more risks, as evidenced by the fact that men incur over 90 percent of workplace fatalities. They are also more aggressive in chasing pay, which sometimes works out and sometimes doesn't. Been there, done that, both ways.) It would also crimp recruitment to fill critical needs. In my case, I was being hired to fill a hole that had become a real problem for the office. The people trying to cover that particular niche as a collateral duty were drowning in it, and it wasn't their forte even had they had time. When what you really need is a Sphinx, only a Sphinx will do.
Another consideration: if one really, really, really wanted to level male-female pay differentials, one remedy would be to eliminate seniority increases. Women on average will miss years of service to stay home with young kids. If they do, they will always be behind the men in seniority-weighted pay systems. If there is a salary range for a given job, people will eventually max out, but this may take many years. It is common to find offices with a cadre of lifers who are at the top of the range working with more junior employees, younger and often female reentrants, who are doing the same job for significantly less pay. So: should we get rid of seniority pay, starting with step increases in federal service?
People on the left reflexively drift towards the demand that pay be regulated along the lines now common in government service. Bureaucrats like to base pay on objectively measurable factors like academic degrees, number of people supervised, and skill sets as enumerated in job descriptions, the KSA forms in the federal service, and on resumes. The result is rampant resume padding, out of control credentialism, and truly amazing -- really, you have to see it to believe it -- grade inflation in position descriptions. This surfaces from time to time when a competent outside auditor seriously evaluates federal vs. private sector position descriptions based on a thorough desk study of the work actually performed. It is very common to find federal positions rated as "senior" when the same tasks in the private sector are being done by junior and mid-level people. But because OPM accepts agency job descriptions at face value, many federal positions are seriously over-graded in terms of GS level.
The alternative is to allow employers to pay what they need to pay to meet the needs they perceive at any given moment, and to evaluate people based on performance. But that requires taking responsibility. It's not what bureaucracies do well.
For this sad state of affairs, I fault Congress, not federal employees. The latter are trapped in a dysfunctional system and are simply playing the system by the rules that exist. In general, federal pay scales are severely compressed. The feds pay very, very well at entry level through middle management. Senior managers are underpaid. Many do indeed leave; there is more movement in and out than many people realize. Those who do stay are attracted by the unparalleled job security and the attractive pension. But I will say this: you would be hard-pressed in the private sector to find someone running a five billion dollar a year operation and earning $170,000 a year. Or serving as SFO or chief legal counsel of said operation, for a like salary. And many of those federal lifers are very, very good at their jobs. At the branch chief and administrator levels, you are dealing with people who have been competitively selected for promotion for 30 years. A few are just time servers, but many of them are very sharp cookies who know their agencies, programs and the underlying law and regulation in infinite detail. These are the people the pay system needs to find a way to keep.
SFO=CFO. Or CIO. Or chief anything of a very big organization. The feds at this level are underpaid, and have too much job security.
RBG, please take note...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.