[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 47 (Tuesday, April 19, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E686]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




INTRODUCTION OF THE PAYCHECK FAIRNESS ACT OF 2005 AND THE FAIR PAY ACT 
                                OF 2005

                                 ______
                                 

                       HON. ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON

                      of the district of columbia

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, April 19, 2005

  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, today I am pleased to join my House 
colleague Rosa DeLauro and Senator Hillary Clinton as original 
cosponsors of the Paycheck Fairness Act and Senator Tom Harkin as an 
original cosponsor of the Fair Pay Act. The Equal Pay Act has been a 
highly successful civil rights statute, but it is creaky with age and 
to be useful, it must be amended to meet the changed economy in which 
it must now to do its work. The Fair Pay Act also amends the EPA but it 
picks up where the EPA leaves off.
  Huge changes in the economy and the workplace have occurred since the 
EPA was passed, and most important is the emergence of a highly 
educated workforce of women with even 75 percent of women with small 
children working for pay. However, women are vastly underused 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. We introduce the Fair Pay Act because the pay problems of most 
women today stem mainly from this sex segregation in the jobs that 
women and men do. Two-thirds of white women, and three quarters of 
African American 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 
or race 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, have already demonstrated that you can eliminate 
the part of the pay gap that 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% less than male jobs. There often 
will be some portion of the gap that is traceable to market conditions, 
but twenty 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 four or five 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 see women 
shifting out of vital female dominated occupations, and the resulting 
effects of the shortage of workers, see 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.
  The Paycheck Fairness Act is important simply to meet our obligation 
to keep existing legislation current. It simply updates the 42-year old 
Equal Pay Act. Recently, I thought we were seeing progress when the 
census reported that black college educated women actually earned more 
than white college-educated women, although the overall the 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% 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 white women often take that affects their 
wages.
  The best case for a strong and updated EPA occurred here in the 
Congress in 2003, when the 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. 
The FPA simply modernizes the EPA the first of the great civil rights 
statutes of the 1960s to bring it in line with later passed civil 
rights statutes. Because I enforced the EPA as chair of the Equal 
Employment Opportunity Commission, I know all too well the several ways 
that this historic legislation needs a 21st century make-over.
  We file these two bills today to say start with the Fair Pay Act or 
start with the Paycheck Fairness 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 worked 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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