The Introduction of the Fair Pay Act of 2007

Floor Speech

THE INTRODUCTION OF THE FAIR PAY ACT OF 2007 -- (Extensions of Remarks - April 25, 2007)

* Ms. NORTON. Madam Speaker, the 1963 Equal Pay Act (EPA), the first of the great civil rights statutes of the 1960s, was highly successful for close to 20 years, but it is too creaky with age to be useful today. It is long past the time to amend the EPA to meet the changed economy, where women work almost as much as men. Every year, my House colleague ROSA DELAURO and I, and scores of other Members, introduce the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill to amend the EPA to make its basic procedures equal to those used in other antidiscrimination statutes. However, the Fair Pay Act (FPA), which Senator TOM HARKIN and I have also introduced, not only amends the EPA, but it picks up where the EPA leaves off to bring the EPA into the 21st century by taking on sex segregated jobs where gender influenced wages leaves average women workers without any remedy too long. Congresswoman DELAURO and I have long pressed for the passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act and both of us will testify at its first hearing today before the Committee on Education and Labor about what is at bottom a procedural update that should have occurred 25 years ago. I will be testifying from my own experience as the first woman chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), when President Jimmy Carter moved the EPA and other civil rights statutes to the EEOC as parts of a historic organization when I became chair.

* Along with my indispensable Senate partner, TOM HARKIN, I again introduce the Fair Pay Act to reach the average woman worker, who is often first steered to and then locked into jobs with wages that are deeply influenced by the gender of those who have traditionally held those jobs. Women are greatly underused today because of employer steering, and because of deeply rooted wage stereotypes that result in pay according to gender and not according to the skills, efforts, responsibilities and working conditions necessary to do the job. I introduce the Fair Pay Act because the pay problems of most women today stem mainly from this sex segregation between the jobs that women and men traditionally do. Two-thirds of white women, and three quarters of AfricanAmerican women, work in just three areas: sales and clerical, service, and factory jobs. Only a combination of more aggressive strategies can break through the ancient societal habits present throughout human time the world over, as well as the employer steering of women into women's jobs that is as old as paid employment itself.

* The FPA recognizes that if men and women are doing comparable work, they should be paid a comparable wage. If a woman is an emergency services operator, a female-dominated profession, for example, she should be paid no less than a fire dispatcher, a male-dominated profession, simply because each of these jobs has been dominated by one sex. If a woman is a social worker, a traditionally female occupation, she should earn no less than a probation officer, a traditionally male job, simply because of the gender associated with each of these jobs.

* The FPA, like the EPA, will not tamper with the market system. As with the EPA, the burden will be on the plaintiff to prove discrimination. She must show that the reason for the disparity is sex discrimination, not legitimate market factors. Corrections to achieve comparable pay for men and women are not radical or unprecedented. State employees in almost half the State governments, in red and blue States alike, have already demonstrated that you can eliminate the part of the pay gap tht is due to discrimination. Twenty States have adjusted wages for women State employees, raising pay for teachers, nurses, clerical workers, librarians, and other female-dominated jobs that paid less than men with comparable jobs. Minnesota, for example, implemented a pay equity plan when they found that similarly skilled female jobs paid 20 percent less than male jobs. There often will be some portion of the gap that is traceable to market conditions, but 20 States have shown that you can tackle the discrimination gap without interfering with the free market system. The States generally have closed the discrimination gap over a period of 4 or 5 years at a one-time cost no more than 3 to 4 percent of payroll.

* In addition, routinely, many women workers achieve pay equity through collective bargaining, and countless employers on their own, as they see women shifting out of vital female-dominated occupations, the resulting effects of the shortage of workers, and the unfairness to women, and are raising women's wages with pay equity adjustments. Unequal pay has been built into the way women have been treated since Adam and Eve. To dislodge such deep seated and pervasive treatment, we must go to the source, the female occupations where pay now identifies with gender and always has.

* Recently, I thought we were seeing progress when the census reported last year that Black, college-educated women actually earned more than white, college-educated women, although the overall wage gap for Black women, at 65 percent, remains considerably larger than the gap for white women. No explanation was offered for the progress for Black women, but other data and information suggest that even when women seem to catch up it may not be what we had in mind. I suspect that African American women are represented disproportionately among the 50 percent of all multiple job holders who are women. I am certain that this progress for African American women also tells a tragic story. The decline in marriageable Black men, eaten alive by ghetto life, also means that many college-educated Black women are likely to be single with no need for even the short time-out for children that many white women often take that may affect their wages as compared with Black women.

* The best case for a strong and updated EPA with at least the Paycheck Fairness Act occurred here in the Congress in 2003, when women custodians in the House and Senate won an EPA case after showing that women workers were paid a dollar less for doing the same and similar work as men. Had they not been represented by their union, they would have had an almost impossible task using the rules for bringing and sustaining an EPA class action suit. The FPA simply modernizes the EPA to bring it in line with later passed civil rights statutes. From my tenure as EEOC chair, I know all too well the several ways that this historic legislation needs a 21st century make-over.

* We cosponsored both these two bills every year to say let's at least start with the Paycheck Fairness Act so we can be prepared to go further with the Fair Pay Act. Start where you like, but Congress should be ashamed to let another year go by while working families lose more than $200 billion annually--more than $4,000 per family--because even considering education, age, hours works and location, women are paid less than they are worth. Let's start this year to make pay worthy of the American women we have asked to go to work.

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