One year ago today, President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which restores the law to where it was before the Supreme Court's decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. by clarifying that a discriminatory compensation decision or other practice that is unlawful under title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 occurs each time compensation is paid.
In signing the bill, President Obama said, "equal pay is by no means just a women's issue -- it's a family issue... And in this economy, when so many folks are already working harder for less and struggling to get by, the last thing they can afford is losing part of each month's paychecks to simple discrimination."
One year later, the law has already been applied to court cases involving allegations of wage discrimination; however, an earnings gap still remains, as does wage discrimination, as attested to by wage discrimination complaints filed and court decisions.
Women earn only about 80 cents for every dollar that a man earns, and the gap is even greater for African American women and Latinas, who earn only 70 cents and 63 cents, respectively, for every dollar a man earns.
The wage gap has significant consequences to the economic security of women and families. Today, families are increasingly dependent on women's wages. In married couple families, wives' earnings account for 36 percent of family income, and approximately 2 million women have now become the sole breadwinner, supporting families with just over one-third of the usual family income.
Reducing or eliminating the earnings gap will require action on many fronts, including moving more women into non-traditional jobs, creating opportunities for occupational mobility, and addressing wage discrimination.
While women have made strides in increasing their numbers in male-dominated occupations, among the 20 leading occupations of employed women, women are the majority among all but first line managers/supervisors of retail sales workers; managers, all others; and cooks.
My vision of "Good Jobs for Everyone" includes, among other things, increasing workers' incomes and narrowing wage and income inequality and helping workers who are in low-wage jobs find a path into middle class jobs. Among the steps the Labor Department will be taking to deal with wage discrimination is a renewed emphasis on the identification and elimination of gender-based compensation discrimination at the worksites of Federal contractors. In addition, the Women's Bureau has been engaging in and will increase its outreach to stakeholders and its education efforts to its customers to apprise them of their employment rights in furtherance of my vision.
This entry also appears on the White House blog along with a video of the signing ceremony.
Follow Sec. Hilda Solis on Twitter: www.twitter.com/HildaSolisDOL
Tabby Biddle: Her Future: How Women Can Live Happy Lives
It comes down to things like the hiring manager playing a little more hardball with a female employee looking for a raise.
When they control for experience, field and education, the wage gap still exists.
As Layoffs Surge, Women May Pass Men in Job Force : http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/business/06women.html
The issue is not so simple as "the gender gaps and glass ceilings" of yesteryear. The boilerplate rhetoric in your posting is, frankly, obvious to most of us nowadays ~ so much so as to be 'patronizing' to us.
WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT MASSES OF UN- and UNDER-EMPLOYED, HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATED MEN??
iow, what difference does it make if Mrs. Smith realizes "wage equality" with men: (1) when NEITHER men NOR women are earning a 'living' wage; and, (2) when Mr. Smith has no job, nor prospects, and The Smith FAMILY is nowadays dependent upon TWO WAGE-EARNERS to feed, clothe, house, educate, and I daresay INSURE (now that your Administration is threatening to make it a crime for the Smmiths NOT to have Health, Auto, Home, etc. insurance with a private corporation) themselves and 2-1/2 dependents?
Madam Secretary, your issue is "job equality." Our issue is SURVIVAL.
In the quest for equality, the information must be equitable.
The question that is seldom answered by these people is...WHY is it always the female parent having to take time off to attend to Little Johnny, when most children presumably have two parents?
In cases where mom's the main bread-winner, the man should be leaving to take care of the kids.
And many jobs do pay people for not being there- vacation time, sick time, personal days, etc.
If both parents have salary based jobs with these benefits, they should be trading off who stays home with Little Johnny and his runny nose. The problem is that many men feel that child rearing is women's work, leading to an imbalance in who takes time off.
I have addressed the issue of boys falling behind in education at every level. When I point out that all of these women's groups have done a great job helping girls get even and now ahead, maybe they could now help boys, the answer I get is...
Go start your own groups. Translation - equality is not the goal. Helping women, even if it's now at men and boys expense, is the goal.
Whever I have encountered discussion of how men need to do 50% of the parenting, I ask if they will help men get custody of the kids in divorce cases 50% of the time, instead of the 5% of less that men get custody. That would allow men to parent more equally. I am basically told to **** off.
So, evidently, we are NOT all in this together and equality is NOT the real goal. Lobbying for one's own gender to get as much as possible appears to be what the fight for equality has become today.
I wonder if any of the women who said these things or the ones who amened or echoed them would agree with this idea....
Cont....
A organization dedicated to getting men HIGHER salaries. We would never work to lower women's, of course, they can fight their own fight.
But, if because we succeed in raising men's wages enough relative to women's wages that the gap becomes 65 cents on the dollar instead of 76 cents so be it....
Go form your own groups.
I suspect that same women telling me that they will continue to disadvantage boys until men form groups to help them would not care for this statement.
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My daughter wants to be a school teacher so that she can travel in the summer....but I'm go to force her to go to engineering school then I'm going to force her to get an MBA....join corporate america....work 70 hours per week....heck I'll give her testosterone shots if necessary. Individuality is not improtant....allowing women to be differnent from men and make different life choices in NOT acceptable.....we must become exactly like MAN !! We must close this wage gap no matter how miserable it makes us !!!!
A common scenario is: A hiring manager has 120K to allocate to two positions that are almost identical. If he/she hires both a man and a woman of equal qualifications for these positions, it would be common sense that both should make 60K. Unfortunately, what usually happens is the woman gets 55 and the guy 65. Why? *MAYBE* the woman will have kids, take maternity leave and work shorter hours. What if the woman doesn't have kids, and the man actually takes more time off for his kids because his wife works longer hours? Women lose out on a lot of retirement savings over this.
I'm glad I never went through childbirth with some of these chip-on-the-shoulder males who so resent women earning a fair wage for their work.
"President Franklin D Roosevelt was ailing. Too ill to make his 1944 state of the nation address to Congress, he instead broadcast it by radio. But at one point he called in the cameras, and set out his vision of a new America he knew he would not live to see.
Roosevelt proposed a second bill of rights to guarantee every American a job with a living wage, a decent home, medical care, protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness and unemployment, and, perhaps most dangerously for big business, freedom from unfair monopolies. He said that "true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence".
The film was quickly locked away."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/jan/30/michael-moore-capitalism-a-love-story
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"... indeed.
FDR was highly in-tune to the threat of Nazi Germany, too bad he was so tone-deaf to the equally dangerous threats of communism and statist socialism.
Im also interested in statistics that might show number of women laid off vs. men, and also statistics that show # of people laid off in the last 5-10 years, over the age of 45. Trust me, these things need to be addressed more than equal pay.
In the forward of the study, preparded by The Department of Labor itself, not CONSAD, the following conclusion is stated.
Although additional research in this area is clearly needed, this study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.
"the raw wage gap should not be used as a basis to justify corrective action",
" The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers."
"Indeed, there may be nothing to correct."
And yet the Secretary thinks this "will require action on many fronts."
Hmmmmmmm..............
All the "little things" government does so well!
The name "Good jobs for Everyone" seems to contradict the following part of the vision: "helping workers who are in low-wage jobs find a path into middle class jobs". This contains the assumption that low-wage jobs are here to stay.
But the only way to have good jobs for everyone is to eliminate low-wage jobs, since they are not good jobs and some people are going to have them. Now, eliminating low-wage jobs may be impossible. But if it is, then so is good jobs for everyone.
I am suggesting that when the rhetoric fails to match reality, people will pay no attention and assume it's the same old. Better to scale down the rhetoric perhaps.
Multinationals who pay minimum wage? That's another story entirely. I work for a low-wage employer, know his gross by the day, week, month, and year, and would far rather work for someone like him (however bigoted and loud) and use my skills to improve a small local business, than to work for a Mart, be paid far less than my skills are worth, and be forced to utilize them to fill the pockets of slaveholder wannabes. The shame of the situation is that if we force these scoundrels to raise wages, they will automate, import more illegals, and cut the overall wage base even further. It's a rigged game and all we can do is protect ourselves.
Companies and corporations must be licensed to operate in the various jurisdictions around the country. This is done, among other reasons, to make sure that they operate in a way that doesn't harm the commons. I assert that these discriminations do harm the common weal.
Another assumption that is almost never discussed is that women are pressured into making the choices to be away from the work force partially because they typically earn less and so there is less drop in family income that way. But other than for the actual birth, recovery and initial breast feeding, this set up precludes fathers from taking the same amount of time off to assist in chld rearing.
We've allowed the interest of corporations to trump the interest of families. It's completely upside down.
If a woman feels some kind of "pressure" to leave the workforce to have a baby and raise it, why is that a corporation's problem? That's a choice that families make and the Labor Department (no pun intended) should have nothing to say about that decision.
Interestingly, women are expanding their lead over men in terms of college enrollment. As such, I wouldn't be surprised if they are earning more than men in another 20 years or so. In any event, the government should get its nose out of it except in clear cases of discrimination.