The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania recently held in Rowland v. Certainteed Corp. that the Ledbetter Act does not extend the three-hundred day statue of limitations period for a Title VII claim for failure to promote. The Plaintiff in Rowland alleged her employer violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when it promoted a male employee instead of her. She also alleged a violation of the Equal Pay Act because she received less pay then similarly situated male employees and because those similarly situated male employees became eligible for pay increases before her.

In Pennsylvania, a plaintiff has three-hundred days to file a complaint of employment discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) and with the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission (“PHRC”). If the Plaintiff fails to file within that period, she cannot file a claim under Title VII. In Rowland, some of the events the plaintiff claimed supported a claim for failure to promote occurred more then three-hundred days before she filed her discrimination claim with the EEOC and PHRC. To avoid the dismal of those events from her complaint, she argued that the Ledbetter Act permitted her to file a failure to promote claim more then three-hundred days after the occurrence of the alleged discrimination.

The Ledbetter Act was passed in response to the Supreme Court’s Decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., which held that the time to complain about a discriminatory practice under Title VII begins upon the date of the discrete unlawful act of discrimination and does not renew each time a subsequent adverse nondiscriminatory act results from that past discrete act of discrimination.

As an example, if a person, because of discrimination, was not promoted on day one, she could not raise a claim on day three-hundred-and-one for the adverse result of that discriminatory act, e.g, a smaller paycheck. Sure, a smaller paycheck is adverse to that person’s bottom line. However, the act of receiving a smaller paycheck is not discriminatory by itself; rather it results from a discriminatory act—the failure to promote.  If the person in our example did not file a claim for failure to promote within three-hundred days of the day she was not promoted because of discrimination, she is out of court.

Because Congress did not like that result with respect to claims for discriminatory compensation, it passed the Ledbetter Act. The Act provides that a discrete act of employment discrimination occurs with respect to discrimination in compensation when:

a person is affected by application of a discriminatory compensation decision or other practice, including each time wages, benefits, or other compensation is paid, resulting in whole or in part from such a decision or other practice.

Therefore, when a female employee is paid less then a similarly situated male employee, she can bring a claim for discrimination in compensation within three-hundred days of receiving a paycheck.