What lowers a persons pay?
1. Did someone change names?
2. Did the person shift the blame to 'Damn Microsoft!' when its hand-written notes?
3. Is work performance by word-of-mouth? Or sales reports?

Regular is regular, over work should be time-off, not lower pay. Regular is not slacking off, nor is disabled, elderly, even pregnant.

- wheres all the work tracking and performance tracker stuff from 'Management College'.

I'm not quite clear if there's a question here, but I sense your frustration and can agree with that. And the problem is that often employees just don't know what factors determine their pay, and have no way to compare their salaries with their co-workers. So this act would make it easier for people who, against the odds, eventually do determine that they've been paid discriminatorily.

Thanks for your comments.

Your post echoes the frustrations that many women in America are feeling right now as a result of Republican Senators efforts to block discussion on this important piece of legislation. The misinformation that has been put forth by John McCain in response to the cloture motion (which he skipped) reveals a willingness to deny wronged Americans a chance at remuneration in order to make a political statement about litigation.

McCain’s comments that, instead of legal recourse, women should be provided with additional “education and training,” show that he is either completely oblivious to the nature of pay discrimination (i.e.: paying an equally qualified individual less than another for equal work, on account of race, sex, disability etc…), or is just lying.

Beyond discrimination, perhaps this legislative failure will draw attention to another factor in the pay gap between men and women: unpaid child-care responsibilities. Women are more likely to be the primary caregivers for their children, and only three states have laws that require employers to provide paid leave (most often funded through payments from employees' own wages into disability insurance.) Unpaid leave translates into lower accumulated wages over a woman’s lifetime, plus entire families being confronted with extremely difficult choices. Having passed the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act would have been an important piece of the effort to narrow the pay gap, but would not have been an ultimate cure…although not for the reasons that McCain has asserted.