It must be an election year. Check out the proposed Civil Rights Act of 2008. That’s a link to the Workplace Prof Blog, and the post’s author, Professor Hirsch, believes it’ll be a campaign issue. I do hope so. It looks like a laundry list of employee-friendly (thus mostly business-unfriendly) changes to the law, mostly having to do with expanding possible damages and expanding who’s covered by worker civil rights laws. There’s also an arbitration provision that I think will interest at least 33% of my three readers: It prohibits clauses that compel arbitration of federal statutory or constitutional claims unless everyone agrees to it after the dispute. Can someone more knowledgeable than me explain whether that will have significant scope beyond civil rights laws?
However, I did notice that the bill doesn’t seem to address the Supreme Court’s ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire, which for those of you playing along at home, was the ruling denying a woman’s pay discrimination claim because she waited too long to file it, because she didn’t know there was a pay disparity until the clock had run out. (That’s often not how it works; in a lot of situations, the clock on a tort claim starts after you discover the problem.) Google suggests that this is covered by a bill introduced last year called the Fair Pay Restoration Act.
