CHARLOTTE — Lilly Ledbetter, the namesake of the first piece of legislation President Obama signed in office, said Tuesay night at the Democratic National Convention that equal-pay legislation is “bigger than me.”
The Supreme Court told me that I should have filed a complaint within six months of the company’s first decision to pay me less even though I didn’t know about it for nearly two decades. And if we hadn’t elected President Barack Obama, the Supreme Court’s wrongheaded interpretation would have been the law of the land.
And that would have been the end of the story. But with President Obama on our side, even though I lost before the Supreme Court, we won. The first bill that President Obama signed into law was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. I think it says something about his priorities that the first bill he put his name on has my name on it too.
As he said that day with me by his side, “Making our economy work means making sure it works for everyone.”
