[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 44 (Wednesday, March 27, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H2942-H2948]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
WOMEN, WAGES, AND JOBS
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May
12, 1995, the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia [Ms. Norton] is
recognized for 60 minutes.
Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, this special order on women, wages, and jobs
comes during Women's History Month, but more pertinently it comes
because finally the issue of declining wages in our country has made it
onto the national agenda.
The underlying discontent that has been there for two decades have
come forward, and we see it in the Republican primaries. It is
interesting that at least since the early 1980's many of us have been
pointing to this un-American phenomenon where the stock market does
well and people do poorly. Somehow or other it never caught on. There
has been some attention paid to it as it affects men because the
manufacturing sector has been so decimated as jobs have moved offshore.
Now that the country is beginning to recognize that something different
is happening, it is important that we look at all of those of whom
something different is happening, and that is why I choose to raise it
in relation to women.
As a former chair of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, I
have long had an interest in discrimination against women. More is at
work here than simple discrimination, however. What is at work here is
the nature of our economy itself, some historic changes that are
underway that reflect upon the kinds of jobs that are being produced
and who gets those jobs.
The effect is felt in the widest gap in incomes we have seen since we
have been keeping these records. We need to look at how this phenomenon
affects women in particular because with the change in the economy
there have been the greatest changes in women in the work force.
I want to point to a bill I have introduced, the Fair Pay Act, which
in its
[[Page H2943]]
own way is to the 1990's or seeks to be to the 1990's what the Equal
Pay Act was to the 1960's.
This body in 1963 passed the Equal Pay Act in order to close the wage
gap between men and women, and the Equal Pay Act has done a very good
job for its limited mandate. Essentially, it was to look at people
doing the same job and being paid differently for it. Some progress has
been made, partly because of the Equal Pay Act, so that we have gone
from about a 62-percent gap now to something like a 71-percent gap.
That is the good news until we hear the bad news.
The bad news is that the closing of the gap itself reflects an
alarming decrease in male wages as well as the new presence of highly
educated women or highly skilled women in entry-level positions only.
In other words, the average woman is just where she was. The average
woman is experiencing what the average man is, stagnant or declining
wages. But at entry levels, highly educated women like doctors and
lawyers make the same as men, although those women have a gap that
develops within their profession after the entry level.
I am this evening interested in the average woman, the silent worker
out there every day. The Fair Pay Act is directed specifically to her
and to part of what she is experiencing.
The Fair Pay Act simply says if you are doing comparable work you
ought to get paid the same. The Fair Pay Act says if you are an
emergency services operator, that is a female-dominated profession, you
should not be paid less than if you are a fire dispatcher, that is a
male-dominated profession.
Under the Fair Pay Act if you are a social worker, you would not earn
less than a probation officer simply because you are a woman and he
happens to be a man. Should not the market set the rates? That is
precisely what the Fair Pay Act tries to do, even as the Equal Pay Act
intervened in order to have the market set the rates.
Too often the habits of employers over the decades have built in
distortions to the market. Women and minorities paid the price in
reduced wages.
I want to emphasize that the Fair Pay Act that is H.R. 1507, would
not, in fact, intervene into normal market processes, and that has been
the problem people thought they saw in comparable worth work.
{time} 2215
My bill would allow the extraction only of the discrimination factor,
and the burden would be on the plaintiff, on the woman, as is always
the case in discrimination cases, to show that the difference in wage
she is experiencing is because of discrimination and not because of
unbiased market factors.
I offer that this evening for inspection as one approach to the
problem I raise in women and jobs.
I want to move to another remedy as well. We are finally beginning to
talk about raising the minimum wage. Here is a subject covered with my
mythology. If we are going to talk about women workers, we must talk
about the minimum wage. Indeed, if we are going to talk seriously about
welfare reform, we must talk about the minimum wage. Who are we talking
about when we talk about a minimum wage worker? Some Americans would
say, well, I think you are talking about a bunch of teenagers working
at McDonald's. The typical minimum wage worker is a white woman over 20
years of age, likely to live in the South, who has not had the
opportunity to attend college and who works in a retail trade,
agriculture, or service job. That is who the minimum wage worker is.
She is your wife and you daughter. She is your aunt and your young
friend who has just graduated from high school.
Most minimum wage workers are women; 5.75 million women are paid
between $4.25 and $5 per hour. That means 17 percent of all hourly paid
female workers earn the minimum age and only the minimum wage. Most
female minimum wage workers are not teenagers. They are adults. And
when we say women are earning the minimum wage, we are talking about
almost certainly the guardians of poor children. Often, most often,
these minimum wage workers are women who are raising the poor children.
Now, Mr. Speaker, I am not here talking about the favorite subject of
this body, deficit reduction. The minimum wage will add not 1 cent to
the United States deficit. What it will do is take 300,000 children
immediately out of poverty, 58 percent, almost 60 percent, of minimum
wage workers are women. Nearly half of full-time jobs, and the
statistics will show that many, if not most, of the others wished they
could get full-time jobs, but of part-time minimum wage jobs 15 percent
are black, 44 percent of minimum wage workers are Hispanic. What would
we do, what would I have us do? Simply to raise the minimum wage to
$5.15 per hour. Is there anybody in this body who would think that is
too much for them to earn or too much for anyone they know to earn, too
much for any constituent of theirs to earn? It would not have to come
in one fell swoop. It could go to $4.70 an hour by July 5 this year and
to $5.15 an hour by July 1, 1997.
Understand who we are talking about when we say the minimum wage
worker. We are talking about the traditional way in which we have set a
marker of what it means to be an American below which you shall not be
forced to work. We are talking about a person who works typically 40
hours a week, 52 weeks a year, and earns $8,840. The impact of lifting
the minimum wage would be that immediately 300,000 people, I want to
correct what I said before, 300,000 people would be lifted out of
poverty; 100,000 would be children. Only one-third of those affected by
such an increase would be teenagers, because almost 70 percent of
minimum wage workers are 20 years old or older. They are adults going
out to work every day with less than a poverty wage. That is who they
are.
Since 1979, we have found that 97 percent of the Nation's increase in
wealth has gone to the wealthiest 20 percent. The remaining 3-percent
increase in wealth is left to the other 97 percent of the Nation's
workers, and who has taken the brunt are those at the very bottom.
The value of the minimum wage has dropped 30 percent, my colleagues,
since 1979. I want to put this graphically to you. I want us to face
who we are talking about. Let us look at a family of four and consider
what would happen if the sole earner is a minimum wage worker above the
poverty line. The current poverty line for a family of four is $15,600.
Now, if that family of four has one worker earning the minimum wage,
$4.25 an hour, working full time the year around, about $8,500 a year,
that worker would receive a tax credit, thanks to legislation passed by
this body, if we do not cut it terribly much, and there are proposals
to cut it, but today that worker would receive a tax credit of $3,400
under the 1996 provisions of the earned income tax credit.
That worker is so poor, that worker, single wage earner in a family
of four, that she could collect food stamps worth $3,516. She would
nevertheless still pay $650 in payroll taxes after qualifying for
benefits and paying her payroll taxes. This family ends up $834 below
the poverty line.
This is America, my friends. We cannot continue to send people to
work every day, working hard, working in work you do not want to do and
I do not want to do, and have them come home below the poverty line.
That is dangerous. You are hearing the rumblings of it out there in the
Republican primaries. Answer the call now.
In every State there will be large percentages that will benefit from
an increase in the minimum wage. In my own city, a fairly small
percentage, 7.8 percent, would benefit, and as I look at what would
happen in some of the States, I am simply amazed. Idaho, almost 14
percent of the workers would benefit. In Louisiana, almost 20 percent
of the workers would benefit. In Michigan, 10.5 percent; in
Mississippi, 17 percent of the workers would benefit. In North Dakota,
18.2 percent of the workers would benefit.
I see my good friend and colleague from Georgia, Representative
McKinney, here. In Georgia, 11.9 percent of the workers would benefit.
Very substantial percentages all across the United States, regardless
of sex, regardless of your preconceptions about the place, regardless
of whether you think of it as a poor State or a rich State, you have
substantial proportions of the population that would immediately
benefit from a raise from the minimum wage, not 1 cent added to the
deficit, a sharing of income of the kind
[[Page H2944]]
that has been typical in the United States that as companies become
more prosperous there is a greater sharing of the profits with the
workers. That is what has not been happening. That is why we are having
a growing income gap.
The number of African-Americans who would benefit is important to
note. Seventeen percent of all hourly paid African-American workers are
minimum wage workers, and most of these low-wage workers are female.
Twenty-one percent of all hourly paid Latino workers are minimum wage
workers. And Latino women are especially likely to be paid very low
wages; 25 percent of hourly paid Latino women earn at the minimum wage.
Now, I want to examine the critique of an increase in the minimum
wage that is most often made, and that is that you reduce job
opportunities. The answer is that that is not the case. I refer to
nearly two dozen independent studies that have found that the last two
increases in the minimum wage had a insignificant effect on employment.
The Nobel Laureate economist Robert Solow recently told the New York
Times that the evidence of job loss is weak, and I am quoting him,
``The fact that the evidence is week suggest that the impact on jobs is
small.'' Prof. Richard Freeman of Harvard said the following: At the
level of the minimum wage in the late 1980's, moderate legislative
increases did not reduce employment and were, if anything, associated
with higher employment in some locales. We remember the 1980's, do we
not, when there was a plethora of minimum wage jobs breaking out all
over in this country? Minimum wage seems not to do what the
conventional wisdom tells us. Kind of look at the facts. We have got to
look at the studies.
There is also the myth that the blow will be to small businesses.
First of all, 90 percent of workers in small business already earn more
than the current minimum wage. Do not think that people in small
businesses are simply looking for the cheapest labor they can find.
They are looking for the best labor they can find. They have got to
have people who give them the biggest bang for the buck. In any case,
the law does not apply to businesses that do not have annual sales in
excess of 4500,000 or employees that participate in interstate
commerce. You have got to be in that category even to be covered. That
means that many small businesses are simply not affected by the minimum
wage at all. Ninety percent of workers in small businesses earn more
than the current minimum wage. Indeed, half of minimum wage workers
work in firms with more than 100 employees. That is cheating workers.
What this means is, we are giving a break to moderate and larger
employers, because we are allowing them to hire people at minimum wage
and keep more of the profit for themselves and they pass that on to us,
ladies and gentlemen, because those people qualify for supplemental
welfare, those people qualify for the supplemental benefits, food
stamps and the rest. So go right ahead the way you are doing it,
because what is means you are doing when you are allowing people to pay
the present minimum wage is your are subsidizing that employer
yourself. That is us, we, the taxpayers.
{time} 2230
That is us, we, the taxpayers. Let them pay for the labor. Business
is doing well. President Clinton has had an extraordinary effect on the
stock market because of the way in which he has reduced the deficit.
That is one of the factors that is yielding large gains in the stock
market.
Where are those gains reflected in the pay envelope of the minimum
wage worker? Why should the taxpayers subsidize that worker with food
stamps or other supplements, rather than have the employer, who has
profited from that worker pay? Let that employer pay.
This line is stark enough so that even without it being a big poster,
I think I will make my point that a higher minimum wage does not cost
jobs. This is the job level in 1991. This is the job level in 1996
since the last minimum wage increase. What we are seeing is there has
been an extraordinary rise in jobs.
By the way, many of these are part-time, temporary, low-wage jobs.
Whatever happened to the notion that if you raise the minimum wage, you
will not make jobs? This is what has not been proved. This is the myth
that is helping to sustain the minimum wage.
This is the myth that means the taxpayers are supplementing people
who should be paid for their labor by the companies, almost all of them
larger companies, or certainly medium-sized companies at least for whom
they work.
Let me take a pause now, because I am very pleased to see that the
gentlewoman from Georgia has come to the floor. I am very pleased to
welcome the gentlewoman from Georgia, who always does her homework, and
who has joined me in this special order.
I yield to the gentlewoman from Georgia, Representative Cynthia
McKinney.
Ms. McKINNEY. Thank you very much. I certainly want to commend you
for the role that you play in terms of being a role model for the newer
Members and for people like me who have long looked up to you and now
find myself working right next to you. I just want to say thank you for
your leadership.
I have got some posters that I think punctuate what you have said.
Here I have a chart that shows how from 1979 to 1995 the wages of men
have decreased. The wages of women increased, and then began to
decrease. The gap that was closing between men and women was basically
because the wages of men were dropping.
Then, of course, as you have pointed out, the income gap. We have not
seen the kind of income gap that we are experiencing now since the days
just prior to the Great Depression. Here we see that the top 25 percent
receive more than 95 percent of the income growth. The other 75 percent
of Americans receive less than 5 percent of the income growth.
Meanwhile, the top 5 percent of American families got more than 40
percent of America's growth.
Just as you so correctly pointed out about the impact that the
President's policies have had on the deficit, the decrease in the
deficit, and Wall Street, Wall Street sizzles, and Main Street fizzles.
I have another chart. Again, as you so correctly point out, the
subsidies, the social safety net that we have painstakingly constructed
or woven, is there because there are some corporations that are getting
away with not paying their fair share. Certainly they are not paying
their workers what they are worth. What we have seen here just in terms
of the corporate income tax is that corporate income taxes have gone
down, and, of course, individual income taxes have had to take up the
slack.
In the previous special order we had one of our colleagues discussing
about the diet that he was on, trying to lose 50 pounds, and he was
going to lose 2 pounds and then save the other 48 pounds for the last 2
days of the diet.
Well, I think that is about the way the Republicans have run this
ship of state, because they in their budget put off the hard decisions
until the out years. But the Progressive Caucus has come up with a
budget plan that does not put off the hard decisions into the off
years. It goes right in by cutting defense spending and cutting
corporate welfare. We demonstrate that you can have a downward trend, a
steady downward decline in the deficit, if you make the hard choices,
and you make them early.
So basically I would just say that when the economy is bad, nothing
else is good. The work that you have put together with the legislation
will improve the lives of working women all over this country.
I come from a family where my mother worked. She worked for 40 years
at Grady Memorial Hospital as a nurse. I am a single female head of
household, and I am a working woman. I suspect that if my son grows up
and marries, as I suspect that he will, he will also marry a working
woman.
We just want to make sure that the leadership of this country is
aware and sensitive of the needs of working women, and that is what
your legislation provides for.
I would also say, as the only one in the Georgia delegation, that
after we were elected, we had women come to our office for issues that
ranged from access to credit, to child support enforcement, to sexual
harassment, and
[[Page H2945]]
even something as simple as a role model who showed to them that, yes,
it could be done.
So just as we plead with our colleagues to make sure that the plight
of working women is not forgotten, we plead for ourselves, and I
commend you for your legislation and the work that you do as a role
model for the rest of us.
Ms. NORTON. I want to thank the gentlewoman not only for those very
kind remarks, and coming from her they are treasured, but also for that
very compelling statement. I very much appreciate her coming forward,
particularly this late in the evening. But we have got to use what
opportunities we have in order to make these important points at this
critical time.
Let me continue then. What has happened to women? The gentlewoman
from Georgia indicated that women were in fact beginning to improve,
and that is true. But women have now been caught in the same spiral
that has dragged men's wages down, and that is why we have really got
to step up and take notice.
Until the 1970's women came into the work force drawn there by rising
real wages. In order words, they came into the work force because they
could earn more money and they were drawn to the work force by virtue
of the lure of greater income.
Since the 1970's, there has been sluggish wage growth. Still they
come. They come because they must. They come even though the wage gap
for them, for the average one of them, is not closing.
Now, it is very interesting, in the 1980's we did see a rather
precipitous narrowing of the wage gap. It is not altogether clear why,
but we do know this, that 50 percent of the gap remains unexplained. We
believe that possible explanations may be occupational segregation,
women's jobs versus men's jobs, you are in a woman's occupation. That
has typically had low-wage discrimination. Women having secondary
rather than primary jobs, internal labor market influences.
In any case, the figures tell you about the creation of a whole new
work force in our lifetime. In the 1950's, 30 percent of the work force
was women. Today, 45 percent of the work force is women. In other
words, we have come to the point where half of the people who go to
work every day are men and half of the people who go to work every day
are women. Yet the reward of wages is simply not there for the average
woman.
Indeed, if we look at where women are employed, the lower the
earnings, the greater percentage of women in that occupation. That is
whether they are making goods or performing services.
Why are women working? I can tell you this much, they must be
working, because there is no other choice, because half of all married
women with children under 3 are in the labor force. Few women, unless
they are highly educated and making a lot of money, and that is rather
few, are going to go to work if they have a child under 3. In the
1970's, it was not half of all married women, it was a quarter. That
means we have doubled. They are there because they have to be there.
They are there because they are single head of household, or they are
there because one wage earner cannot do it any longer in a family of
two wage earners.
Women are to the new service economy what men were to the economy of
the Industrial Revolution. Let us face it. That is what women are. We
have fueled the new economy with women. Except in a very real sense,
they look exactly like the male industrial workers, low paid, poor
benefits of the 19th century. The conversion is itself remarkable. The
conversion I speak of is in the economy itself, which has prepared the
way to accept women workers.
In the 1960's three-quarters of all the nonfarm job creation was in
services. That is a lot. But by the 1970's, 80 percent of all the
nonfarm job creation was in services. By the 1980's, 100 percent of all
the net job growth was in the services. Four out of every five women
work in a service job.
What do I mean by a service job? Because what I mean by a service job
is in fact or tells in fact the story of declining and low wages.
{time} 2245
A service job for a woman is a fast-food job. It is a job in a
department store. It is a job as a health aide. It is a job as an
insurance company clerk. It is a job in residential day care. It is a
job as a beautician. It is a job as a clerical. The next time you go
into the department store, look at that woman. Look at her closely, and
you will know what I mean.
Mr. Speaker, the interesting thing is that historically, women tended
to be in school and hospital jobs. There are proportionally few workers
there because there are so many other workers in these other service
jobs now that they have overwhelmed these school workers and the
hospital workers, but watch out.
The school workers and the hospital workers very often were teachers
and nurses, and those are relatively high-paid women's jobs, compared
with health aides, insurance company clerks, fast-food clerks and
department store clerks. These are honorable jobs. These are often good
jobs. They just do not pay well. They do not pay what they are worth.
Listen to your constituents. They are hurting. They are hurting
because they are not earning what they are worth. We have the only
answer, is to get a greater sharing of the benefits of the labor with
those who perform the labor. That is the American way, and unless it
works that way, you get a disgruntled working class. There is no
getting around it. You cannot continue to have a democratic society
with a greater and greater share of the wages going to the top and
almost none going to those at the bottom.
Now, do we have a situation where the money simply isn't there, that
is the problem? That, my friends, is not the problem. You need only
open your paper and look at what the stock market is doing, and you
will see that the money is there. If anything, downsizing should have
resulted in workers who were there getting paid more. It did not. That
is why many companies are taking a second look at downsizing, because
they have done it on the cheap. They have done it at the expense of
workers and have not, in fact, increased productivity, have not done it
the old-fashioned way, the American way.
Mr. Speaker women have become the indispensable new workers who are
fodder for the new economy. The last time the country needed the kind
of labor supply we have gotten from women in the last two decades were,
No. 1, at the time of the great immigration from Europe in the late
19th and early 20th century and No. 2, at the time the black workers in
the South left and came North. Today, instead of asking workers to come
from Europe or Asia to the United States, and of course there are many
immigrants who come, instead what we are saying is, look at your own
household and send a worker out for the new economy. If you are going
to send a worker out for the new economy from your own household, then
should not that new worker be paid what that new worker is worth?
Listen to your constituents now. Hear the cry. I say to my colleagues
on the other side of the aisle, listen to your own primary. I never
thought I would live to see a Republican sound like a labor Democrat,
but I think that is what I heard Pat Buchanan sounding like. Now, that
is not his tradition, and that is not the way he has run his political
life, but I do think he heard something out there. We all better listen
to it.
Whenever we have listened, we have found a remedy. This is not
susceptible to yesterday's ideology or even tomorrow's. This is a new
problem in the United States. When wages are low, the economy is bad.
When wages are high, the economy is good. What is this new phenomenon?
The economy is good and wages are low. Should not work that way.
Mr. Speaker, one of the things we can do, if it is working that way,
is to look at the minimum wage, which has simply lost its value, and
say pay people a little more to work. If you do not, you discourage
work and then, of course, my friends get up on the House floor and say
why do they not work? If it does not pay to work, how can we expect
people to work?
This is America. This is America at the turn of the century. This is
a country that must not send people to work only to have them come home
poor. That is what is happening.
[[Page H2946]]
Economists tell us that there are a number of explanations for the
low wages of women in particular. Typically, we are told that a reason
for these low wages is crowding or concentration in traditional women's
occupations. There may be some of that, but recent studies look to
other answers. There was crowding in men's occupations. They had low
skills, and yet in manufacturing, they had high wages. Why? My friends,
the economists say it was because they were unionized. When the company
would not share the profits, men went out and unionized. Women have not
done that, and that may be part of the reason the economists tell us
that they have not been able to extract a fair share of the profit of
their labor from their employers.
We are also told that a reason is low capital investment in the
industries in which women work. Even though we may not find the real
answer any time soon, we need to look for a remedy very soon. We cannot
allow the United States to become a place where you develop a permanent
working class or, God forbid, what appear to be the case in many of the
inner cities, a permentnt lumpenproletariat, people who never move up.
Those would be the homeless, the people who are chronically or
constantly unemployed. A greater and greater proportion of our
population falls into this category.
This has never been that kind of European-class society. It has been
a society where, however poor you were, you could look forward to being
better off than your father. You may have been poor, but not as poor as
he was. So there was steady progress, and a man could live to see a man
who picked cotton live to see his son or daughter go to college. Today,
people go to college on college loans and come back home to live
because they cannot afford to strike out on their own, the way their
parents did.
Mr. Speaker, this is a new America. This is not our America. We do
not have all the answers to this America, but we do know this. Surely
one of the answers, not maybe, but one of the answers surely is to give
back at least some of the value to the minimum wage. It will have an
effect, not only on those low-income workers, but it will have
something of a ripple effect on those who are nearly as badly off, and
you will not know the difference. You will not know it in the deficit.
The businesses is question will hardly know it, because a few cents
from their profit will go to their workers instead. Who among us would
wish for any less?
Mr. Speaker, I recognize that the notion of the minimum wage, or for
matter, my Fair Pay Act, are matters that have tended to divide
Republican from Democrat, but it was in a Republican primary that one
heard this cry first, and it was a Republican candidate that has tried
to respond to it. He has responded to it in ways which many, not only
in his own party but in mine, simply cannot agree. But he has heard
something real. This body must hear something real. It is there. Do not
deny it.
Do not tell low-paid workers who go to work every day that something
will happen if you only wait for the economy to fit my paradigm,
whether it is your flat-tax paradigm, your national sales tax paradigm
or, for that matter, paradigms from my side of the aisle, such as
stimulation paradigms. People need hope and relief now.
The minimum wage is traditional to American life. Even on the other
side of the aisle, few say we should abolish it. There are some, but
few. If we put to a vote today to abolish the minimum wage, I believe
those of us who say keep it would prevail. The real question is, are
you going to keep it at a level that is worthy of the name minimum
wage? So far, we have not, and we are going to pay very severe
consequences if we do not.
Among other things, any welfare reform bill we pass will come back to
hit us in the face because the people on welfare will come back to
claim other benefits because they will not be able to earn enough to
pay the rent and to put food on the table.
So I come forward this evening to talk about women's wages in
particular, and that is not because I think the problem of men's wages
is any better. In fact, it is worse. Men have fallen out of the labor
force at an astounding rate because of the decline in the manufacturing
sector. Men have experienced an extraordinary reduction in their annual
wages over the last quarter of a century.
Mr. Speaker, I have come to the floor this evening to talk about
women because I do not intend for women to be lost in this debate.
Because if you do not speak up for women, they surely will be lost in
this debate. The Women's Caucus found them lost in the health debate
before we spoke up, as we did today when we introduced the Women's
Health Equity Act. Before we spoke up about breast cancer and
osteoporosis and, for that matter, clinical trials for women with heart
disease, before we spoke up, they got lost in the health debate. We do
not intend them to be lost now that the country has heard some voices
that say we work every day and it is getting worse.
I come to the floor this evening to say I hear you and I believe that
many on both sides of this body hear. They heard it on the other side
in their primary. We hear it on this side, as well. Doing something
about it through the minimum wage, as a first step, is a good-faith way
to say we hear you. We are going to respond not in a radical departure
from what we have always done, but in the tradition that we have always
used, in an increase in the minimum wage that will give you a small
raise in your pay envelope.
Remember that these minimum-wage workers pay the same social security
taxes that the rich do, and the difference in the impact on their pay
envelopes is gargantuan. They need a break. They need a raise. Many of
them are women, and the majority, the great majority, of those who earn
the minimum wage are women, and they are the people who take care of
your children. They are the people of the next generation. Hear them.
Receive them. Respond and remedy.
Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Speaker, I take this opportunity, as organized by my
valued colleague, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, to address the
economic condition of women, the jobs that they do and have, and the
wages that they receive in relation to the general pool of wage
earners. Some of us have been deeply concerned by the deteriorating
economic status of the vast majority of workers, citizens, in this
country. Although this fall from economic grace began about 16 years
ago, the cumulative effects of this steady drop are now beginning to be
painfully felt by the majority of job holders.
The experience and story of one of my constituents, whom I shall call
Geraldine Mason, is descriptive of many other people in my district and
throughout the United States.
Ms. Mason has one pre-school child. She works in a produce market and
tries to work at least 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, but can only
get about 32 hours of work a week. She gets more than the minimum wage,
$5 an hour. Her wage is a bit higher because the San Francisco bay area
is one of the most expensive places to live in the United States. When
she is lucky and works a steady 50 weeks in the year, her total income
is $8,000 a year. After taxes, her take home pay is $7,710.
She shares an apartment with her sister; Betty's share of the rent is
$250 a month or $3,000 a year.
Of course she needs child care. Although she is on several lists for
the few subsidized child care slots in the area, there are needier
cases than hers--women who have even less income. So she pays something
nominal, $100 a month, $1,200 a year to members of family who are
available. Her share of the utilities, telephone, and garbage comes to
$55 or $660 a year.
Her job is 5 miles from home and she uses public transport. She can't
afford the monthly pass, so she pays $1.25 per trip which adds up to
$625 a year. Her food comes to $900 a year; supplementary medical care
$299 a year; incidentals, $600 a year. Total: $7,710 a year. This
income is augmented by the Earned Income Tax Credit which is under
attack.
We are citizens of the United States and are indeed blessed and
fortunate to be in a land of agricultural wealth, with human and other
resources of which we are justifiably proud. Although we suffer natural
calamities--floods, droughts, and earthquakes--we are large enough so
that by pooling our national resources we have been able to absorb such
shocks better than most nations. We have indeed been blessed to not be
in permanent drought as is an increasing band of land in the sub-Sahara
region or in the frozen tundra of Russia. We are a wealthy nation.
Why then, should Geraldine Mason, who wants to work and does work;
who is a responsible mother and a tax-paying citizen, pushed up against
an impossible wall to
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scale? What do we, the lawmakers and the law implementers tell
Geraldine Mason how to survive in this economy?
``Between 1979 and 1991, families headed by people under 25 years old
saw their incomes drop $7,200 a year from $24,000 to $16,800 * * *.''
Even the better established 25-34-year-olds suffered an income drop of
$4,000 going from $35,600 to $31,500 during this period. There are
about 20 million workers in the United States in Betty Mason's
situation.
We know that at differing levels, college graduates, postgraduate,
and professionals are beginning to feel the simultaneous crunch of
income maldistribution, loss of jobs, and job insecurity.
On maldistribution, 1 percent of American households, with net worth
of at least $2.3 million each, owns nearly 40 percent of the Nation's
wealth; the top 20 percent of American households, with net worth of
$180,000 or more, have more than 80 percent of the Nation's wealth;
this figure is the highest of all industrial nations.
At the bottom end of the scale, where Geraldine Mason is stuck, and
many single, divorced women with children are, the lowest earning 20
percent of Americans earn only 5.7 percent of all the after-tax income
paid to individuals in the United States.
According to Marion Anderson, as published in ``Running Up the Down
Escalator,'' an Employment Research Associates report,
ENTRY LEVEL WAGES 1979 AND 1991
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
High school graduates College graduates
-----------------------------------------------------
All Men Women All Men Women
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1979...................................................... $8.32 $9.39 $7.12 $11.32 $12.57 $10.07
1991...................................................... 6.48 6.90 6.02 11.30 11.39 10.75
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is another worker: Susan Casavant lives in Vermont, in
Congressman Sanders' district. She presented her story to the
Progressive Caucus panel at the March 8, 1996, hearing on ``The Silent
Depression, the Collapse of the American Middle Class'' on her work in
Vermont. She states
I feel as if I am a good worker, I've been quite flexible
and displayed responsibility and honest work. I have learned
how to work in almost every department. Other employees
depend on me in order to receive their work. I believe I pull
a heavy load, both in and out of work.
I have such a hard time making a living because Peerless
Clothing pays poverty-level wages!! Why?
She makes $5.25 an hour, up 25 cents an hour from the $5-an-hour
starting wage.
. . . I work 40 hours per week plus overtime and Saturdays.
My less than $200 a week check makes me feel like a fool. . .
. It's still hard to make a good living. I still live with
my family because I can't afford to pave my own road. . . .
The insurance provided to us costs $41.70 per week for me and
my son, that's about $168 per month and the worst part is
that it doesn't cover half of the things me and my son need.
I never thought my future could look so uninviting, I am
twenty-one years old and I still depend on my parents; my
mother cares for my son because I can't afford a good, safe
day-care.
I live in America, the land of freedom, so how do big
companies like these get away with bringing down honest
people and their hometowns too? I would like to live in
security instead of doubt.
When Susan Casavant and other workers tried to form a union, the
company said that it would close or move.
What does the 104th Congress say to her?
This is what we can say: American workers need a raise. American
workers, who are among the world's most efficient and productive, need
to have some sense that they can learn, work, and make a living wage.
This Nation needs our workers, and our economy needs their work and
needs their buying power.
In this Congress, I am proud to be a cosponsor of three bills raising
the minimum wage: Mr. Gephardt's H.R. 940 which raises the minimum wage
to $4.70 an hour; Mr. Sanders' H.R. 363 which raises the minimum wage
to $5.50, and Mr. Sabo's H.R. 619, which raises the minimum wage to
$6.50 an hour. It is clear from the rosy picture of our economy that
the growth is on the increasingly bowed back of our increasing pool of
low-paid workers--a disproportionate share of whom are women.
Franklin D. Roosevelt understood the experience, the lives, the
misery of the people struggling to find work and income in the 1930's.
As Roosevelt led this country to victory by successfully calling on our
sense of national pride, by calling on our sense of fairness and
democracy, our sense of justice, he was proud to declare in 1944, and
much of the Nation thrilled to hear him declare, his Economic Bill of
Rights.
Section 2 of this declaration states the U.S. policy of ``The right
to earn enough to provide for an adequate living.''
Space limits me from quoting the other sections which gave Americans
in 1944 and later, such a sense of empowerment and self-respect,
empowerment and self-respect that we are now losing, and with it our
sense of pride in ourselves and each other.
Twenty three of us in the 104th Congress can say and have said that
we can make a living wage and that there can be jobs at decent wages
for all who want to work and can work. This statement is embodied in
H.R. 1050, A Living Wage, Jobs for All Act, which I was proud to
introduce with 22 cosponsors; among them Eleanor Holmes Norton.
It will represent a new contract with our people--one that answers
Geraldine Mason and Susan Casavant as to how they can have pride in
their work and share equitably in the benefits of our wealthy Nation.
During the 104th Congress many of the ideas can be developed,
improved upon, sharpened, critiqued, and openly discussed around the
country in public meetings, and by the end of the year brought together
into a whole legislative package to be reflected in a new budget for
the 105th Congress.
I respectfully urge my distinguished and hard-working colleagues to
join me in developing a process which will give our citizens new
opportunities for economic security and which will hold out hope for
women that they can be made full partners in this economic security.
Ms. JACKSON LEE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my
colleagues in the Women's Caucus for calling attention to the issues
facing women in the work force and the difficult work they have done to
celebrate this year's Women's History Month celebration. I am delighted
to participate in this discussion of women, wages, and jobs, because it
is an issue that has become increasingly important to us all, as women
are now an integral part of the American work force.
First of all, let me commend the millions of women who juggle the
dual role of homemaker and breadwinner, as well as those who choose
homemaking as a career--for in our society every woman has a crucial
role to play.
From the beginning of time, women have performed tasks which were
crucial to the economic and social development of our society. At one
time, we were only allowed to become educators nurses, seamstresses,
and hairdressers, yet today we have expanded our roles to include
doctors, lawyers, judges, administrators, and yes we have conquered the
sciences as well. And so I say to the women of America, ``you've come a
long way.''
Yes, we have come a long way, and my colleagues and I serving in the
104th Congress bear witness to that fact, yet we have so much farther
to go.
On Friday March 8th, women across the globe celebrated International
women's Day. A day which was set aside to mark the beginning of the
struggle for equality and rights for women. In many countries, it was a
day mixed with celebration and protest. Celebration for the many
economic, social, and political obstacles we have successfully
overcome, and protest for the ongoing inequalities and barriers that
continue to deny us full participation in society. Yet in America,
International Women's Day went literally without notice. Did we fail to
recognize this day because we have conquered all the obstacles or is it
because we have fallen down on the job?
Mr. Speaker, I submit to you that in spite of the strides that have
been made, until we eradicate pay inequalities, the glass ceiling,
sexual discrimination and the myriad of other problems facing working
women, our battle is far from over.
A recent report from the U.S. Department of Labor's Glass Ceiling
Commission shows that women represent over half of the adult population
and nearly half of the work force in America. Women compose half of the
work force, yet we remain disproportionately, clustered in
traditionally ``female'' jobs with lower pay and fewer benefits. These
studies show that women who make the same career choices as men and
work the same hours as men often still advance more slowly and earn
less.
Women remain underrepresented in most nontraditional professional
occupations as well as blue collar trades. Consider the following:
Women make up 23 percent of lawyers but only 11 percent of partners
in law firms, women are 48 percent of all journalists, but hold only 6
percent of the top jobs in journalism, women physicians earned 53.9
percent of the wages of male physicians, women are only 8.6 percent of
all engineers, women are 3.9 percent of airplane pilots and navigators;
and in dentistry, women are over 99.3 percent of hygienists, but only
10.5 percent of dentists.
The report found that although the pay gap for women narrowed
significantly in fields such as computer analysts, it widened in
others. They show that in 1993 women earned only 72 percent of the
wages paid to men. This wage gap is worse for women of color. White
women earn 72 cents per every dollar made by white men while African-
American women earn 64 cents and Latino women earn a mere 54 cents.
Mr. Speaker, working women in this country have been fighting for
equal pay for equal work for over 20 years now, and although the gap is
closing, it is not happening at the rate any of us should be pleased
with. When this
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government exposes civil or human rights violations in other countries,
we are quick to impose sanctions to encourage people to remedy their
behavior, yet when companies within our own borders continue to violate
these same rights, we turn our heads, and say, ``these things just take
time.'' Well, how long will it take before working mothers can actually
support their children, without the extra assistance from family, or
government.
In closing, I would thank to Rep. Norton for allowing me the
opportunity to speak on this issue.
____________________