By Associated Press
Washington, DC – A former tire plant employee who was paid less than her male co-workers is asking the Supreme Court to uphold a jury's pay discrimination verdict.
After 19 years at a Goodyear Tire and Rubber plant in Gadsden, Lilly Ledbetter was making six-thousand dollars a year less than the lowest-paid man in the same job.
A federal jury awarded her nearly four (m) million dollars in a pay discrimination lawsuit filed in 1999 but that amount was reduced to $360,000.
A federal appeals court overturned the verdict on the grounds that decisions about pay were made long ago, well after the deadline for alleging discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
In Ledbetter's appeal to the Supreme Court, her lawyers said each paycheck represented a violation of civil rights law by Goodyear.