[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 42 (Thursday, April 10, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H1428-H1431]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




      TIME TO PUT PAY EQUITY FOR WOMEN BACK ON THE AMERICAN AGENDA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 1997, the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia [Ms. 
Norton] is recognized for 50 minutes.
  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, all over the country today, women are 
preparing for tomorrow, for they have been alerted by women's 
organizations and others that tomorrow is a day for commemoration, it 
can hardly be for celebration, because it is pay inequity day, the day 
on which women earn what a man earned during the previous year.
  I want to devote my time this afternoon to discussing some issues 
which I think will astonish many. I want to acknowledge that the 
gentlewoman from Texas [Ms. Jaction-Lee] wished to participate in this 
Special Order and was unable to do so.
  Interestingly, pay equity was one of the great issues of the 1960's 
and 1970's. What has happened to the issue? Why do we not hear it 
discussed as much? Have we in fact finally remedied pay inequality 
between men and women?
  One of the things that happened, Mr. Speaker, I think, is that women 
represent such a broad and diversified group that women have in fact 
balkanized and diversified their agenda so that in a very real sense it 
is very difficult to indicate what matters most to women.
  This afternoon I want to bring us back to basics, because what we are 
certain of is that a most dramatic structural change has occurred in 
the United States and in the American family. The housewife has 
virtually disappeared from the American landscape, and I am going to 
say to you, Mr. Speaker, that is not because there are not millions of 
women who would prefer to stay at home with their children, and I think 
frankly would be better off staying at home with their children, as 
would their children be better off, but during the past couple of 
decades, the fact is that the American standard of living has been 
going down, wages have stagnated and in fact decreased, so women are 
out there because they have to be out there, and this quite apart from 
the millions of women who want to be out there in order to reach their 
full potential in the workplace.
  It is time that we put pay equity back on the American agenda if we 
mean what we say about the American family. The very reason that these 
women have gone to work in the first place is the American family and 
the pressures to keep the American standard of living where it was. 
Even so the average tow-parent family is not where that family was in 
the 1950's and 1960's, even with two people working. We have not been 
able to keep family income at the level we experienced in the post-
World War II period.

  I have a special interest in this issue because I am a former chair 
of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where I raised the 
issue of pay equity for the first time during the Carter 
administration. But, Mr. Speaker, this is not an issue for government 
officials and expert lawyers; it has now become a grassroots issue as 
American women struggle out to work every day and, working year-round, 
have only been able to bring themselves to the point where they are 
worth 72 cents for every dollar earned by a man.
  In case we think that this concern of working women is confined to a 
small group, let me offer these figures: 40 percent of all working 
women have children under 18. In two-parent families, 66 percent of 
women work. The number of female-headed households has doubled since 
1970. We are dealing with a structural change in American society. We 
cannot run from it, but we certainly have hidden from it.
  Today I introduced a bill that begins to deal with that part of the 
problem that may come from discrimination.

                              {time}  1500

  I have done so because of my concern about the gap, which is closing, 
ironically enough. I am very pleased that the gap appears to have 
gradually closed. We are 72 cents on the man's dollar, but more than a 
decade before that we were 62 cents on the man's dollar.
  But when I looked behind these figures, Mr. Speaker, I found that 
while there had been some progress, most of it had nothing to do with 
the average woman. The gap has, indeed, not closed at all for many 
women because the figures we are using measure women against the 
decline in men's wages. Therefore, we have been able to catch up to men 
in large part, in very significant part, because men's wages have 
declined so dramatically over the last couple of decades.
  That is not what we had in mind when we indicated we wanted to close

[[Page H1429]]

the gap. Indeed, the Equal Pay Act that it was my great privilege to 
enforce has a requirement which I think drives home the fact that 
decline in men's wages simply is not the way to measure progress for 
women.
  When an employer finds in enforcement the Equal Pay Act that women 
and men doing the same job are not paid equally, the Congress has not 
left the employer the option to lower the man's wage. The employer must 
raise the woman's wage. This has not happened in this regard; many men 
are not in the work force at all, and others have found they could not 
make the kind of living their fathers did.

  We know there are many causes for this decline in male wages, 
including the export of manufacturing jobs, particularly union 
manufacturing jobs which afforded a man in the 1950's and 1960's an 
income even though his educational level might have been low. Those 
jobs have fled offshore in very significant numbers.
  Another significant reason that the gap has closed is because there 
are a small group of women who in fact have attained higher skills. 
They tend to be professional women and highly skilled women, and at 
least at the entry level those women earn the same wages as men. 
Unfortunately, as they go up the job ladder, the disparities begin to 
appear again.
  This much is clear; that the American family can no longer afford to 
have the woman wage earner lose $420,000 over a lifetime because of 
wage inequality. This much is true; that the country cannot afford to 
have women lose $100 billion in wages each year because of wage 
discrimination.
  Is there nothing we can do about this problem? We can certainly do 
something about the problem insofar as it results from discrimination. 
Let me make clear, Mr. Speaker, that not all of this problem results 
from discrimination, but it is surely the case that some of it does. 
That is why today I have introduced the Fair Pay Act, a bill which 
takes up where the Equal Pay Act left off.
  The Equal Pay Act says if a man and woman are working side by side or 
are in the same workplace, you cannot pay the woman one thing and the 
man something more. That still goes on in America. The Equal Pay Act, 
the first of the great civil rights statutes of the 1960's to be 
passed, goes after that kind of discrimination.
  The problem is that we need an Equal Pay Act for the 1990's, even as 
the Equal Pay Act was the great equalizer of the 1960's. The Equal Pay 
Act of the 1990's, I submit, would be the Fair Pay Act. It would go at 
what turns out to be the root problem of the disparities between men 
and women today. Mr. Speaker, that disparity comes from the fact that a 
man and a woman, doing comparable work, can be paid differently.
  Some of the examples are quite astounding. Today, emergency services 
operators are mostly women. Fire dispatchers are mostly men. Gender and 
gender alone has effected the wage disparities. If you are an emergency 
service operator, a female-dominated occupation, you are going to make 
less than a fire dispatcher.

  Mr. Speaker, there are far fewer fires to dispatch people to than 
there are emergencies. If you look at the skill, effort, and 
responsibility of these two jobs, it would be very difficult to make 
the case that emergency services operators need less in skill or in 
responsibility or effort than a fire dispatcher. Why are these two 
groups paid differently? They are paid differently because of gender, I 
would submit, and not because of differences in the job. These two jobs 
are not the very same, but they are in fact comparable. They should be 
paid comparably.
  Let me give another example, Mr. Speaker. Two people graduate from 
junior college at the same time. The man and the woman in the same 
graduating class get married shortly after their graduation. Each now 
has a college degree, or at least a two-year associate degree. She goes 
to be a social worker, he goes to be a probation officer. Guess who 
gets paid the most money? Probation officers make more than social 
workers.
  I would defy the Members, Mr. Speaker, to show me the difference 
between these two occupations in skill, effort, and responsibility. I 
submit that there is none, except that historically social workers have 
been women and probation officers have been men.
  What would I have us do about this problem? Let me first assure the 
Members that I would not have us interfere with the market system. I 
would have us extract only the discrimination from the wage, and the 
way we would do that is the same way we do it under the Equal Pay Act. 
The Equal Pay Act is where the categories of skill, effort, and 
responsibility were first laid out. Even if the market allows an 
employer to in fact hire a woman to do the same job as a man, the Equal 
Pay Act says you cannot do it.
  So if the reason that your cadre of women workers earns less than 
your cadre of men workers doing the same job is that the women are 
willing to work for less, the statute says you have violated the law 
even though the market has provided you with women who are willing to 
work for less, and you must raise their wage to meet the wage of the 
men.
  Mr. Speaker, how this would work in the case of the Fair Pay Act is 
very similar. The burden would be on the woman, as it is under the 
Equal Pay Act, to show that the reason she is paid less as an emergency 
services operator than her employer pays fire dispatchers is 
discrimination based on gender, not in fact legitimate market factors. 
The burden is on her. If she cannot meet that burden, then she would 
not prevail under the Fair Pay Act.
  Mr. KENNEDY of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, would the gentlewoman 
consider yielding to me?
  Ms. NORTON. I am pleased to yield to the gentleman from 
Massachusetts.


                             cpi adjustment

  Mr. KENNEDY of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the 
gentlewoman yielding.
  Mr. Speaker, this is an issue that is actually in a similar subject 
area, and I know that the gentlewoman would agree with the issue that I 
would like to bring up.
  Mr. Speaker, I rise to address an issue of great concern to the 
people across the country. That is the issue of the Consumer Price 
Index. According to a statement today from the White House, a CPI 
adjustment is apparently back on the bargaining table in today's budget 
talks. This is of great concern to many Members like myself, and I hope 
to the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia [Ms. Norton], who have 
written letters, filed resolutions, and spoken out against a magic CPI 
fix to balance the budget.
  An artificial and unwarranted CPI fix would lower Social Security 
benefits for the poor and senior citizens on fixed incomes, many of 
whom are women, raise taxes on low- and middle-income Americans, and 
lower the wages of millions of workers whose contracts are tied to the 
CPI.
  Now we learn that after many pronouncements from both sides that the 
CPI issue is dead, apparently it has come back to life in secret budget 
negotiations going on between the White House and the Republican 
leadership. Given the history of the past budget summits, I am fearful 
that a CPI fix will be agreed on in secret negotiations, buried in 
several hundred pages of budget, and brought to the floor with only a 
single vote on the entire package.
  That is simply not right. Any provision which affects virtually 
everyone in this country, that is so significant, deserves a straight 
up-or-down stand-alone vote. If the CPI fix is a good idea, let it 
stand on its own.
  Therefore, I will be circulating a letter to House leadership on both 
sides of the aisle demanding that any budget or legislative provision 
which contains a CPI adjustment be brought up under a procedure in 
which separate votes up-or-down will take place on the CPI provision 
alone. The American people deserve to know where everyone stands on 
this critical issue.
  I welcome anyone in the Chamber or in this House who would like to 
join me in this effort, and I particularly want to thank the 
gentlewoman from the great city of Washington, DC for yielding to me.
  Ms. NORTON. The gentleman is quite welcome.
  Mr. Speaker, may I add that my Fair Pay Act is an amendment to the 
Equal Pay Act, and not a separate act. One of the things it does is to 
add race and national origin to the Equal Pay Act.

[[Page H1430]]

  Mr. Speaker, I can see that there may be fewer jobs were the 
stereotyping about race and national origin happens to the extent that 
it happens to women, because low-paid jobs tend to be passed on from 
one ethnic group to another. But there certainly are some jobs, and 
those jobs should be reached under the Equal Pay Act, and they would be 
reached under the Fair Pay Act.
  I would like to address any concern about the way the Fair Pay Act 
might affect the market system. Not only are the safeguards I mentioned 
before there, that the burden is on the woman, the plaintiff, that she 
must show that the cause of the disparity is in fact gender and not 
some legitimate cause inherent in the market.
  But there is another reason to believe that comparable pay would not 
have a disruptive effect on our economy. A number of States, more than 
half a dozen, have done comparable-pay studies that affected their own 
State work forces, and some of them have indeed used those studies in 
order to raise the pay of women doing comparable jobs with men. So once 
again, the States have experienced and have shown that comparable pay 
can work. This remedy should be applied to others, as well.

  Mr. Speaker, I am also associated with the Families First Fair Pay 
Initiative, which involves some additions that are perhaps less clear 
cut than my own but which I fully embrace. On Pay Inequity Day 
tomorrow, I think we would do well to take notice of these smaller 
steps, which I believe need to be taken at the earliest time.

                              {time}  1515

  One is simply better enforcement of the Equal Pay Act itself. The 
Equal Pay Act was transferred to the EEOC when I chaired that agency. 
In the beginning we brought many equal pay cases. I am concerned, as a 
prior chair of the agency, that during the 1980's there were very few 
equal pay cases brought at all and that even now there are too few 
relative to the amount of discrimination we know is out there.
  Mr. Speaker, I call upon the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission 
to concentrate far more on Equal Pay Act cases, and I believe that this 
body needs to facilitate that effort by adding stronger penalties for 
violation of the Equal Pay Act.
  The EEOC and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance in the Labor 
Department need additional resources. One of the reasons I believe that 
there has been less enforcement of the Equal Pay Act is because the 
EEOC now has very complicated additional responsibilities, including 
the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, a very important recent 
addition to our law, relatively recent addition, and because of the 
Civil Rights Act of 1991, where we restored the strength of some of the 
equal opportunity laws after a Supreme Court decision. When all of this 
is piled onto an agency that has suffered as the EEOC has in the last 
several years, you may get some neglect of important statutes. There 
has been neglect of the Equal Pay Act. We must, in fact, at a time when 
the American family cannot do without the woman's wage, get our 
bearings and get back to basics with the Equal Pay Act.
  In addition, while the Fair Pay Act is pending, there is something 
that employers can do right now without this body moving. As an interim 
and transition step, I believe that there should be voluntary employer 
guidelines drawn up by the Secretary of Labor so an employer can know 
without having to go through a process itself, whether, in fact, he is 
doing women a disservice by paying women less than the job should 
require.
  An employer has a right to say, is the wage here what one might 
expect for the skill and effort and responsibility required in this 
job? The employer may not mean to discriminate. The Labor Department 
could do women and employers a service by, in fact, drawing voluntary 
guidelines, absolutely no sanctions attached to them, that would act to 
inform employers, that would act as an educational device so that 
employers who wanted to do the right thing would have some guidance as 
to what the right thing to do in fact was.

  The Families First fair pay initiative cannot stop with women in the 
work force. The average woman out here is building a bad pension 
portfolio for herself. She is doing so in part because she is earning 
so little. The average woman makes less than $14,000 a year.
  For a moment, by the way, Mr. Speaker, stop and think what that means 
for her children. What it means, if she is to have any money left over 
for having worked at all, is that she is probably leaving her children 
catch as catch can, and we certainly are doing nothing about that.
  There needs to be a special order, and I will initiate one in the 
future, on child care. With so little money, the agony and the 
frustration that women face as they go to work every day is one of the 
great untold stories of America.
  In a real sense I wonder why women are not insisting that their story 
be told. I have my own theory. Mr. Speaker, my theory is that women are 
raised to do the best that they can, to work night and day, not to 
respect any hours, to hustle from one part of their responsibilities to 
another. They think it is simply natural to get up in the morning and 
put your kids on the school bus and get out yourself and keep dialing 
home after school to make sure that your kids are there and run home 
and put the food on and read to the kids. They think this is natural. 
It is not natural, and it is not healthy for families or for women or 
for children. But at the very least we ought to make sure that this 
frustration does not come to rest in a woman's retirement years, with a 
pension that is too little to support her.
  Mr. Speaker, most of the poor aged by far are women. They live on 
Social Security. One might think that, now that we have women in the 
work force in a more systematic fashion, perhaps that would no longer 
be the case. With the baby boom generation hitting us and with salaries 
still at such a low level, that expectation will not turn out to be the 
case, and there are some things we can do about that. We can expand the 
access of women workers to pensions and to the retirement vehicles that 
are out there. These include 401(k) plans and small business retirement 
plans and IRA's.
  We can require that equitable survivor benefit options be available. 
So, for example, that either surviving spouse would in fact be entitled 
with two-thirds of the benefit received while both were alive. That is 
equity, Mr. Speaker. We could provide that divorcing spouses share 
equally in each other's pensions. Remember, both are working and they 
ought to share equally in each other's pensions unless a court decides 
that that should not be the case.
  We could enact legislation that prevented one spouse's participation 
in a pension plan. I am sorry. We could prevent one spouse's 
participation in a pension plan from limiting the other spouse's 
ability to make deductible IRA contributions.
  The pension area has received even less focus than the employment 
problems I spoke of because women who have too little voice as they 
work find that that voice grows softer and softer in its impact the 
older they get.
  As we approach Pay Inequity Day, Mr. Speaker, we should take note of 
the fact that this body to its credit moved in a way that helped women 
in particular in the last session, the 104th Congress, even without a 
remedy addressed to women.
  Some of our best remedies, dare I say most of our best remedies, are 
gender neutral. They include the Earned Income Tax Credit and the 
minimum wage, even though both assist women far more than men. For the 
minimum wage, 60 percent of the workers are women. When we passed the 
minimum wage last session, 300,000 people were immediately lifted out 
of poverty; 100,000 of them were children. We finally got over the 
false data that was used to show that somehow, if you increased minimum 
wage, you would basically help teenagers and do nothing for adults.
  Only one-third of those affected by the increase were teenagers. 
Almost 70 percent of the minimum wage workers are 20 years or older. 
And, as I indicated, the majority of them are women. These are adults 
who go out here to earn a poverty wage every day. And this issue 
becomes more and more important as we look at the new welfare work 
force. We are still trying to figure out how these people on a minimum 
wage are going to be able to earn

[[Page H1431]]

a living. Imagine what would have occurred if we had not passed the 
minimum wage last year.
  Mr. Speaker, I want to take special note of the fact that among those 
in our society already excluded, particularly people of color, the 
minimum wage has had the most important effect. Seventeen percent of 
all hourly paid African-American workers are minimum wage workers, and 
of course most of these low wage workers are female. Now, that is 17 
percent, even though African-Americans are something like 12 percent of 
the population.
  Twenty-one percent of all hourly paid Latino workers are minimum wage 
workers, and 25 percent of paid Latino women earn the minimum wage.
  Therefore, if our concern is with eliminating disparities among 
people of color and white people, we should be aware that remedies like 
simply raising the minimum wage in an orderly and systematic fashion is 
one of the most effective things we could do.
  There is a lot of concern and interest in getting women to go back 
home and in fact not work. Let me be clear. The women's movement of 
which I consider myself a part does not now and never has had the 
position that women should go out to work. Remember when the women's 
movement started. That was at a time when it was considered heretical 
for women to work. Therefore, women stepped up to the plate and said, 
wait a minute, is that not a choice I should make--because that was the 
background and the backdrop of women's work.
  There are some who claim that we do not want women to stay at home. 
What we want is what women did not have when we said women should be 
able to go to work and what they should have now. And that is the right 
to make the choice with or without sacrifice as to what to do with 
their lives, a choice to be made by them and their families.
  Mr. Speaker, if we really mean that choice to be a real choice, of 
course, we would do what every industrialized country in the world 
does. And that is at least provide some aid through some sort of child 
care system for women who want to go out and work, but we do not do 
that. That has not kept women from going to work. What it has meant is 
women have gone to work with some sacrifice to their children.

                              {time}  1530

  There is a reason women are working. You can bet your bottom dollar 
that there is a reason why half of all married women with children 
under 3 are in the labor force, and that is not because all of them 
have gone to law school and decided that they want to try out their law 
degrees. These are the minimum-wage women I was talking about or women 
just above them. These are the $14,000-a-year women that have no other 
choice and would not leave their children if they had any other choice.
  Even if they have husband, and remember that the number of women who 
are raising children by themselves has doubled since 1970, remember 
that these women are working because this work simply must be done to 
earn a living.
  In 1970, a quarter of all women worked. Now we are up to half. I am 
sorry, that figure was not correct. It was a quarter of all married 
women were working. And now it is half of all married women.
  What we, I think, have been reluctant to face, Mr. Speaker, is that 
women have become to the service economy what the men of the 19th and 
early 20th century were to the industrial economy. Like the male 
industrial workers, women are the low-paid workers with no benefits of 
the 20th century.
  If you look at who does not have pensions, if you look at who does 
not have health insurance, it is full-time women workers, and it is the 
plethora of women, the majority of women, who are part time workers or 
the majority of part-time workers who are women; and many of the part-
time workers in this country tend to be women. The temporary workers 
tend to be women. And I don't think I need to say to this body what 
their benefit and wage levels are. Indeed, increasingly we see 
employers breaking jobs up to make them part-time and temporary 
precisely to avoid paying benefits.
  There is going to come a time, Mr. Speaker, when women come upon this 
body and the other body to rectify this matter. It is time that we 
moved on our own to address this tragic frustration of the American 
family, because remember what these women are doing.
  I have spoken of low-pay jobs for women. I have spoken of minimum-
wage jobs for women. What kind of jobs do I mean? I mean the fast-food 
jobs; I mean the health aide jobs; I mean the insurance clerk jobs; I 
mean the residential day-care jobs; I mean the beautician jobs; I mean 
the hospital worker jobs. Women predominate in these low-paid 
occupations, and yet they have families, they live the same kinds of 
lives, have the same kinds of needs that other families have.
  So on tomorrow, Pay Equity Day, we need to return to the equal pay 
and comparable pay issues. There is a reason why our focus is 
scattered, but we have got to be able to walk and chew gum at the same 
time.
  Women have many, many concerns. It is perfectly appropriate for women 
to reach to those many concerns. None is more important today, Mr. 
Speaker, than assuring that when a woman goes out to work, she at least 
brings home what she is worth. That is what the Fair Pay Act is trying 
to achieve.
  The frustration of having to go to work, for many women with small 
children is great enough, but having to go to work and then hardly 
bringing home enough to pay the baby-sitter or the child care center, 
which may or may not be accredited, that is a frustration we should ask 
no American family to endure. At the very least, we should be moving to 
begin to rectify a problem that is going to take years to remedy.
  There was a time, Mr. Speaker, when pay equity issues were classic 
women issues. Times have changed, Mr. Speaker. The pay equity issue has 
become one of the paramount family issues. This, I submit, is not only 
because of the growth, the alarming growth, if you will, of female-
headed families; this is because in America today it takes two to tango 
in the workplace to bring home enough money for the family. It is wrong 
to send women out in order to help with family income and then not to 
make sure that the woman brings home what her skill effort and 
responsibility on the job would indicate she deserves.

  Mr. Speaker, some of us have been very vocal to young women, saying 
to them that what they must do is to get the requisite education. I am 
very blunt about it to my own constituents. I have a program called 
D.C. Students in the Capitol so I get to talk with them every 
legislative day. I ask their teachers and parents to bring them in 
classes to the Capitol, telling them that 20 million people come to 
visit the Capitol or visit Washington every year, and if you are born 
here and raised here, surely you ought to come.
  And then I ask them, as I talk with them, to give me a promise, and I 
ask them that each raise her hand if she or he can promise me that she 
will stay in school at least until they have finished high school, and 
invariably they raise their hands. And I am very blunt with the boys, 
and I am very blunt with the girls. I talk to the boys about crime, and 
I talk to the girls about pregnancy, and I say I am going to check up 
on you to make sure that you do what you promise to do.
  I do not want to be put in the position of sounding like a hypocrite 
of saying stay in school to the young girls so that you can come out 
here and make whatever an employer wants to pay you. I want to be able 
to say stay in school so you can come out and earn what you are worth.
  For that reason, I ask that on tomorrow everybody think about pay and 
equity, because that is the day on which, remember, we are only in 
April, on which women earn as much as men have earned the entire prior 
year. I ask my colleagues to sign on to the Fair Pay Act. We had 52 
cosponsors last year. Senator Harkin has introduced the bill in the 
Senate already. I have over 20 cosponsors. I invite the cosponsorship 
of all of my colleagues.

                          ____________________