[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 67 (Wednesday, April 25, 2007)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E854-E855]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              THE INTRODUCTION OF THE FAIR PAY ACT OF 2007

                                 ______
                                 

                       HON. ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON

                      of the district of columbia

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, April 24, 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 
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 
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.

[[Page E855]]

  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.

                          ____________________