Lily Ledbetter

WASHINGTON — Democrats are ushering in what they believe will be a new labor-friendly era in Washington with House votes on two bills aimed at helping women fight pay discrimination in the workplace.

The House was to vote on the bills today, and they could reach Barack Obama's desk soon after he enters the White House. Unlike President George W. Bush, who issued veto threats against both measures last year, Obama has embraced them.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she was "very excited" about leading off the new Congress with the labor rights issues. "It is our message to working women in America that we value their work and their time, and that the Congress will not allow them to be discriminated against in the workplace."

With Democrats padding their majority in the House in the November election, both bills should pass with comfortable margins.

The Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is a response to a 2007 Supreme Court decision that made it more difficult to sue over past pay discrimination. The other bill, the Paycheck Fairness Act, would strengthen the 1963 Equal Pay Act that requires equal pay for equal work.

Both passed the House in the last session of Congress but failed to clear the Senate. Senate Democrats, who also fortified their majority in the November elections, fell three votes short of stopping a GOP-led filibuster of the Ledbetter bill in April. Obama made a rare diversion from the campaign trail to speak on the Senate floor in support of the bill. His rival at the time, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., also interrupted her campaign to return to the Senate for the vote.

The White House and other opponents argued that the bills would lead to more lawsuits against employers and be a boon for trial lawyers.

The Senate plans to take up the Ledbetter legislation next week. Clinton plans to introduce a companion to the paycheck fairness bill in the Senate, but no time has been set for floor debate.

Lily Ledbetter was a supervisor at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. plant in Gadsden, Ala. She sued the company over pay discrimination when she learned, shortly before retiring after a 19-year career there, that she earned less than any male supervisor. A jury ruled in her favor, but the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, threw out her complaint, saying she had failed to sue within the 180-day deadline after a discriminatory pay decision was made.

"This ruling just doesn't make sense in the real world," Ledbetter said in a telephone news conference Thursday. "In a lot of places you could get fired for asking your co-workers how much they are making."

Some 20 female members of the House voted against the bill when the House passed it in July 2007. "I am wondering whether any of those 20 would want to make $140,000 as opposed to $165,000," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said. "My thinking is they would feel discriminated against if we passed such a statute."

The House bill would clarify that each paycheck resulting from discrimination would constitute a new violation, extending the statute of limitations.