ON THE ROAD TO THE MIAMI SYMPOSIUM – Newsletter #3

Newsletter Newsletter #3 May24, 2013

In our last issue we addressed the sexual assault in the military. Many new cases have emerged and the controversy continues to grow. This time we move forward to another complex topic: payment inequality between men and women.

The most concerning part of this is that this issue was addressed nearly 60 years ago by the National War Labor Board during World War II, and the organization

advocated for equal wages for male and female workers. As a result, the Equal Payment Act (EPA) was passed in 1963 “The Equal Pay Act requires that men and women in the same workplace be given equal pay for equal work. The jobs need not be identical, but they must be substantially equal. Job content (not job titles) determines whether jobs are substantially equal. All forms of pay are covered by this law, including salary, overtime pay, bonuses, stock options, profit sharing and bonus plans, life insurance, vacation and holiday pay, cleaning or gasoline allowances, hotel accommodations, reimbursement for travel expenses, and benefits. If there is an inequality in wages between men and women, employers may not reduce the wages of either sex to equalize their pay.” Retrieved from http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/equalcompensation.cfm.

Despite all of these efforts, the fight for equal pay is still going on in 2013!

Recently, a bill called The Fair Pay Act, was designed “to make challenging unequal pay easier for women.” This was the first law Obama signed into office as president.However, “Republicans have blocked attempts to move the Paycheck Fairness Act in both the Senate and House, with GOP leaders speaking out in opposition of the bill.” You could read more about this at women-still-earn-less-than-men

According to the U.S. GAO (U.S. Government Accountability Office), “women with a high school degree or less earned lower hourly wages than men with the same level of education… Even when less-educated women and men were in the same broad industry or occupation category, these women’s average hourly wage was lower than men’s… Women have made progress in earning higher wages over the last three decades, but they remain overrepresented among workers who earn low wages. Women made up an estimated 49 percent of the overall workforce in 2010, but constituted 59 percent of the low-wage workforce. You can read the entire report on http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-10 However, the United States is not the only country that faces gender inequality in pay. You will find more information on this at womenonchange.org/quick-facts

The journalist Rachel Maddow dedicated almost 15 minutes of one her shows addressing this problem. She “used statistics from the Department of Labor that demonstrated that men earn more money than women for doing the exact same work.” Maddow said, « If you aggregate everybody working in the economy in every job, women get paid 77 cents for every dollar that men get paid. For the same work, dudes get paid more. » Don’t miss this clip Men get paid more!

As the analysts Ann Garcia and Patrick Oakford well suggest, the wage gap is so consistent across all the possible scenarios throughout the United States that it “persists and is even more pronounced in the immigrant community: An immigrant woman who is naturalized earns just 75 cents to a naturalized man’s dollar. And undocumented immigrant women from Mexico are even more disadvantaged, earning only 71 cents for every dollar that undocumented men from Mexico earn.”

They continued by suggesting that, “Correcting the gender wage gap in the United States will require a host of actions such as passing the Paycheck Fairness Act, which prohibits gender-based pay discrepancies and bans workplace policies that don’t allow employees to disclose their wages to each other.” Read more: http://www.momsrising.org/blog/unequal-pay-day-for-immigrant-women/#ixzz2U5LzgfA9