There were several points I was making:
1) When one person harms another, how they treat other people is irrelevant to the injury. Whether or not I have assaulted other people is irrelevant to the question of whether or not I assaulted you. If I hit you, the injury you receive is in no way altered by how many other people I hit.

Mrs Ledbetter was happy with her pay. She thought that the pay was worth her time and effort. Had it not been, she would have refused the job offer or quit. Working for someone who pays you a satisfactory amount of money is not an injury.

The fact that later on she changed her mind and decided she wanted more money in no way changes the fact that in the past she was satisfied with her pay, and that Goodyear was meeting the terms of the contract she and it both entered.

Had she negotiated a pay increase, she would have been well within her rights. Her attempts to nullify the contract because she regretted selling her labor at a cheaper price than her neighbors do not grant her the moral right to force the other party to the contract to cough up more dough.

2) Equal pay for equal work was not been a central principle of American society. Even if it were a central principle, I would be arguing against this piece of legistlation, because a) I am an anarchist opposed to all laws, b) because this law allows people to post facto rewrite contracts well after they were entered into.

To understand what I am trying to say, you need to consider a set of transactions that people routinely enter into and how the law would affect these transactions.

Consider a person who rents out their labor services, but a house. The renter pays a monthly fee for the use of the house much like a employer pays for the use of a laborers labor.

The rental agreement is in force for years, the renter is satisfied with the amount of money he is paying for the house, while the property owner is satisfied with his income. Then, one day the owner is talking at grocery store, and finds out that his renter is renting a house of simmilar size a few blocks away, and is paying much more for it.

The property owner sues the renter, demanding that he not only increase his rental payments to match those made to the other property owner, but to also to retroactively make payments for past years!

Any court system that allows this sort of suit to go forward is arbitrary and capricious because there is no way of predicting whether or not an agreement that seems acceptable now will generate a lawsuit down the road. You might want to ccheck out these links on the subject of Regulatory Uncertainty to understand exactly what a chilling effect this can have.

Facing this sort of law, I can do one of two things: 1) not hire women and minorities, 2) ensure that they are rigidly paid equal amounts regardless of whether they deserve it or not.

Now, many supporters of the law would argue that the latter is precisely the point. However, this is not the same as paying people based on ability. There are work environments that have rigid pay scales that divorce ability from payment – unionized ones. And, if you ask anyone who has worked in a union shop, you can come up with legion examples of how such rigidity produces perverse outcomes.

3) The price of labor, like the price of everything, is subject to upward and downward pressure. Scarcer forms of labor are more expensive, more plentiful forms are less expensive. Of course, a person selling their labor services wants as much money as they can get, while customers purchasing their labor wants to get it as cheaply as they can.

In labor there is usually a huge band of overlap between the lower limit that a labor provider is willing to work for and the upper limit that a labor customer is willing to pay for. The price that they agree on will lie somewhere on that band. The number they agree on will depend on numerous factors including the bargaining ability of the parties.

This legislation makes women, blacks and other protected groups less attractive – in that they introduce a risk of being sued later on, meaning that the upper price that employers are willing to pay is lower. Instead of the upper limit being their marginal productivity less some profit, it will be marginal productivity less some profit less some risk premium.

Additionally, because it makes employers less likely to consider hiring members of protected classes, it harms the members’ bargaining power. Women who have trouble landing job interviews are going to leap at the first job they get, rather than holding out for higher pay. It is my thesis that this will actually heighten pay disparities, not reduce them.