Essential Estrogen

Today, April 24, is the day women symbolically have to work through to make the same amount men made by Dec 31 of last year.

This afternoon Sen. Tom Harkin attended an Equal Pay Day Rally sponsored by Women Work! the National Network for Women's Employment. Their members include individual supporters of economic equality for women, organizations that assist women to enter, re-enter and advance in the workforce, and state networks that advocate for women's economic self-sufficiency.

His remarks:

It’s great to be here, this afternoon. It’s great to be with fed up, fired up, charged up Americans who have come here with a simple demand: justice and fair pay for working women. So tell me: This is the 21st century, for heaven’s sake. Is it time for women to get equal pay with men? Say yes!

We are demanding equal rights for women in other countries. Is it time for us to practice what we preach, and to demand equal rights for women here in the United States?! We have been patient for too long. It’s time to be impatient. It’s time to stomp and shout. It’s time to demand that Congress act, now.

My friends, discrimination takes many forms. Sometimes discrimination is brazen and in-your-face, like with Jim Crow and apartheid. And sometimes discrimination is silent and insidious – and accepted by people who ought to know better.

That is why I have reintroduced the Fair Pay Act in the 110th Congress. My bill requires each individual employer to provide equal pay for jobs that are comparable in skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions. Today, millions of female-dominated jobs – social workers, teachers, child-care workers, nurses, and so many more – are equivalent to male-dominate jobs. But they pay dramatically less.

We had a hearing on this issue two weeks ago in my committee. One of the witnesses, Dr. Philip Cohen of the University of North Carolina, compared nurses’ aides, who are overwhelmingly women, and truck drivers, who are overwhelmingly men. In both groups, the average age is 43. Both require “medium” amounts of strength. Nurses’ aides, on average have more education and training. But nurses’ aides make less than 60 percent of what truck drivers make.

The Census Bureau has compiled data on hundreds of job categories – hundreds! But it found only five job categories where women typically earn as much as men. My friends, the time for excuses has passed. We’ve all heard the excuses, haven’t we? Some of them are pretty creative. One woman reports that older male executives at her company say that women shouldn’t be paid as much as men because they have the option of marrying rich!

Oh, sure, and women also have the option of winning the lottery. Meanwhile, back in the real world . . . for tens of millions of hard-working women across the United States . . . how about simple fairness and justice?! How about, at long last, paying women the same as men?! How about passing the Fair Pay Act and Paycheck Fairness Act?!

So thank you, you my friends! Thank you for your impatience. Thank you for speaking up so powerfully. And thank you for supporting our fight to pass legislation in this Congress!

In addition, Harkin will be joining with Senators Kennedy and Clinton to send a letter to the GAO today concerning the Administration’s enforcement of current law. The point of this letter is to both point out administration shortcomings and show the need for new laws.

The letter reads:

April 24, 2007

The Honorable David Walker, Comptroller General
U.S. Government Accountability Office
441 G Street, NW
Washington, DC 20548

Dear Mr. Walker:

In the four decades since passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the pay gap between men and women has narrowed considerably for numerous reasons, including the law itself, various judicial precedents such as Shultz v. Wheaton Glass and Corning Glass Works v. Brennan, and an evolving consciousness that women make valuable contributions to the workplace. But despite the progress that has been made, women are still making only 77% of the salaries enjoyed by their male counterparts; women of color fare far worse. There is still a great deal to be done.

As you pointed out in an October, 2003 report, even when accounting for all of the other variables that are often used to justify the pay gap, such as time out of the workforce to care for children or part-time work, women still earn significantly less than men. That report concluded that 20% of the wage gap could not be explained by factors other than discrimination. In addition, the impact of these wage disparities is compounded over time, since women receive significantly less than men in pension income.

We would like to take a closer look at pay disparity issues and, in particular, at the roles that the federal government has played and can play to remedy the wage gap. While many in Congress recognize that true equity will demand equalizing the wages paid in traditionally male-dominated and traditionally female-dominated jobs that require similar qualifications, it is critical that the laws already on the books be fully and proactively enforced to remedy the wage gaps that persist for men and women performing the same jobs.

To that end, it would be helpful to Congress to have a better understanding of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) and the Department of Labor’s enforcement of current anti-discrimination law with regard to gender-based differentials in pay. We would also appreciate a review, similar to the one you recently conducted into pay discrepancies at the Department of Energy, of compensation patterns of at other federal agencies.

It would be helpful if the GAO review could include the following:

• Enforcement activities by the EEOC and the DOL with regard to cases of potential wage discrimination: We would like to learn more about the number of complaints the EEOC and DOL receive, the time it takes to process them, and the action taken to resolve such complaints. We are also interested in compliance reviews initiated by the DOL and commissioner’s charges filed by the EEOC to investigate pay disparities. What proactive enforcement steps have been recently initiated by these agencies?
• Outreach and technical assistance activities by the EEOC and the DOL: In 2000, the previous administration established the Equal Pay Matters Initiative to fund coordination and outreach efforts at DOL and EEOC. The Administration eliminated this program in 2002. Since then, what kinds of efforts have been put forth toward this effort?
• Treatment of the Equal Opportunity Survey: In 2000, DOL adopted a regulation to require the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) to distribute an Equal Opportunity Survey to all Federal contractors to obtain compliance data divided by gender on employment and compensation practices. The regulation specified that the data should be used, in part, to inform OFCCP’s selection of contractors for compliance reviews. In the 6 years since the regulation’s adoption, OFCCP has only distributed the survey one time and to a small percentage of contractors. In addition, the collected data was not analyzed nor was it used for compliance reviews, as required by the regulations of 2000. This survey has now been eliminated. It would be helpful for the GAO to examine the data that was collected to determine if any discrimination occurred.
• Federal pay disparities: Recently, the GAO found pay disparities between women and men of two to four percent at several Department of Energy laboratories. In addition, the GAO examined employee complaints and discovered a pattern of complaints about under-representation of women and minorities in higher level positions. It would be helpful for the GAO to perform similar reviews at other federal agencies.
• Disparities between job categories: It is often reported that employers who understand they are not allowed to discriminate within the same job category will still discriminate between job categories within their firms. If it is possible, it would be helpful to obtain better data from some large employers about how job categories that are highly correlated to specific genders compare to one another in-house.

Sincerely,
/s/ Tom Harkin, United States Senator
/s/ Edward M. Kennedy, United States Senator
/s/ Hillary Rodham Clinton, United States Senator