Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Activist Judges: Conservative Style
Justices’ Ruling Limits Suits on Pay Disparity
Talk about not caring about the spirit of the law.WASHINGTON, May 29 — The Supreme Court on Tuesday made it harder for many workers to sue their employers for discrimination in pay, insisting in a 5-to-4 decision on a tight time frame to file such cases. The dissenters said the ruling ignored workplace realities.
The decision came in a case involving a supervisor at a Goodyear Tire plant in Gadsden, Ala., the only woman among 16 men at the same management level, who was paid less than any of her colleagues, including those with less seniority. She learned that fact late in a career of nearly 20 years — too late, according to the Supreme Court’s majority. ...
In a vigorous dissenting opinion that she read from the bench, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the majority opinion “overlooks common characteristics of pay discrimination.” She said that given the secrecy in most workplaces about salaries, many employees would have no idea within 180 days that they had received a lower raise than others. ...
Title VII’s prohibition of workplace discrimination applies not just to pay but also to specific actions like refusal to hire or promote, denial of a desired transfer and dismissal. Justice Ginsburg argued in her dissenting opinion that while these “singular discrete acts” are readily apparent to an employee who can then make a timely complaint, pay discrimination often presents a more ambiguous picture. She said the court should treat a pay claim as it treated a claim for a “hostile work environment” in a 2002 decision, permitting a charge to be filed “based on the cumulative effect of individual acts.”
In response, Justice Alito dismissed this as a “policy argument” with “no support in the statute.”
If only in America....
Death for corrupt Chinese official
Pallavi Aiyar
Beijing: A Chinese court sentenced the former head of the food and drug agency, Zheng Xiaoyu, to death on Tuesday, a move that comes at a time when Beijing is struggling to quell a wave of scandals pertaining to fake and adulterated medicines and food.
On the same day, China also announced its first ever food recall system for unsafe food products. The two announcements come at a time when China is in the international spotlight after a series of recent investigations revealed several fake and dangerous products to have originated in China, ranging from pet food in the United States to tainted toothpaste in Panama. According to the official Chinese news agency Xinhua, the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court sentenced Zheng to death after convicting him of taking bribes in cash and gifts worth more than 6.5 million yuan ($832,000) between 1998 and 2005, when he was director of the State Food and Drug Administration. Zheng's sentence is open to appeal.
Malpratices condoned
Xinhua said that in exchange for the bribes, Zheng turned a blind eye to malpractices by relatives and subordinate officials, approving the production of untested drugs and lowering the quality standards pharmaceutical companies needed to meet in order to obtain relevant approvals.
China suffered some of its worst food and drug related scandals during Zheng's tenure. The most notorious amongst these was a case in 2004, in which at least 13 babies died of malnutrition in Anhui province after they were given fake milk powder.
Earlier this year, wheat gluten and rice protein exported from China to the United States and then mixed into pet food were found to contain the chemical melamine, which allegedly caused widespread deaths among cats and dogs, leading to pet food recalls. Beijing has responded to this series of scandals by launching a nationwide campaign of drug safety inspections.
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