When the district court ruled against Emmanuel Noel’s failure-to-promote claim on the grounds that he had missed the filing deadline, he cried Ledbetter. But to no avail: In October, the 3rd Circuit affirmed the district court’s ruling in Noel v. Boeing Co., holding that the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act’s scope is limited strictly to discriminatory compensation claims.
At issue in Noel is the scope of the Ledbetter Act, which passed in 2009. The Act says that if an employee is not receiving “equal pay for equal work,” as a consequence of an employer’s discriminatory employment decision, then each paycheck is a discrete discriminatory action that, in effect, restarts the clock under Title VII’s requirement that a complaint be filed within 300 days of a discriminatory act.
