President Obama signed his first bill into law on January 29, approving a change to long-standing equal-pay legislation.  The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Ledbetter case that the 180 day statute of limitations on an Equal Pay Act claim began to run when Ms. Ledbetter was first underpaid.  She claimed that she did not actually discover the pay disparity until years later.  Thus, she was barred from recovering damages from her employer, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.  Note that this case overruled the position of the EEOC on this issue. 
 
The new law (called the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act) will have the effect of starting the 180 day clock each time a worker receives a paycheck which represents a discriminatory rate of pay.  This new rule doesn't really change the substance of the federal equal pay law and actually restores what was the government's enforcement position before the Ledbetter case.  The law will, however, make it more difficult to defend employee claims because it will be much harder to assert the statute of limitations defense. 
 
The new law has a retroactive effective date of May 28, 2007, and applies to all claims of discriminatory compensation pending on or after that date.  For your reference, a summary of the Equal Pay Act (reprinted from the EEOC's web site) is below.
 
Summary of Equal Pay Act:
 
The Equal Pay Act requires that men and women be given equal pay for equal work in the same establishment. The jobs need not be identical, but they must be substantially equal. It is job content, not job titles, that determines whether jobs are substantially equal. Specifically, the EPA provides:
 
Employers may not pay unequal wages to men and women who perform jobs that require substantially equal skill, effort and responsibility, and that are performed under similar working conditions within the same establishment. Each of these factors is summarized below:
 
*          Skill - Measured by factors such as the experience, ability, education, and training required to perform the job. The key issue is what skills are required for the job, not what skills the individual employees may have. For example, two bookkeeping jobs could be considered equal under the EPA even if one of the job holders has a master's degree in physics, since that degree would not be required for the job.
*          Effort - The amount of physical or mental exertion needed to perform the job. For example, suppose that men and women work side by side on a line assembling machine parts. The person at the end of the line must also lift the assembled product as he or she completes the work and place it on a board. That job requires more effort than the other assembly line jobs if the extra effort of lifting the assembled product off the line is substantial and is a regular part of the job. As a result, it would not be a violation to pay that person more, regardless of whether the job is held by a man or a woman.
*          Responsibility - The degree of accountability required in performing the job. For example, a salesperson who is delegated the duty of determining whether to accept customers' personal checks has more responsibility than other salespeople. On the other hand, a minor difference in responsibility, such as turning out the lights at the end of the day, would not justify a pay differential.
*          Working Conditions - This encompasses two factors: (1) physical surroundings like temperature, fumes, and ventilation; and (2) hazards.
*          Establishment - The prohibition against compensation discrimination under the EPA applies only to jobs within an establishment. An establishment is a distinct physical place of business rather than an entire business or enterprise consisting of several places of business. However, in some circumstances, physically separate places of business should be treated as one establishment. For example, if a central administrative unit hires employees, sets their compensation, and assigns them to work locations, the separate work sites can be considered part of one establishment.
 
Pay differentials are permitted when they are based on seniority, merit, quantity or quality of production, or a factor other than sex. These are known as "affirmative defenses" and it is the employer's burden to prove that they apply.
 
In correcting a pay differential, no employee's pay may be reduced.  Instead, the pay of the lower paid employee(s) must be increased.