[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 57 (Tuesday, April 8, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2290-S2292]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
PAYCHECK FAIRNESS ACT
Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, this legislation on equal pay is about
justice, in a word. We could almost say that equal pay equals justice.
There is probably no simpler way to say it. It is really, when you
consider what this means, a very simple concept: If a woman does the
same job, the same work, does all of that in the same way a man does
and is hired by a company, she should be paid the same wage.
It seems so simple, so elementary, but unfortunately we have had more
than one generation now where that has not been the case. Depending on
what study or what year we are talking about, women make, on average,
76 cents for every dollar a man makes, or 77 cents. It has always been
in that band of similar numbers.
I think for a lot of families it is disturbing. How do I tell, in my
case, my four daughters to just do well in school and work hard, as
they have, and get good grades, and once you are on a career path, you
will be fairly compensated for your work because of all that hard work
you did and the good work you do for an employer. What can I say if
they come to me--I hope this never happens--10 or 20 years from now and
say: You know, what you told me isn't true. I did well in school, I
worked hard, I got hired and worked hard in the job I have had, and I
am getting paid 76 cents for the $1 a man makes doing the same work in
the same place at the same time. It makes no sense.
So really, in essence, it is about whether we are going to be true to
our words and true to the values of this country, and it is about
giving people a fair shot on something as fundamental as the wages they
are paid for their labor--to use an expression from the Bible, laboring
in the vineyards; laboring at a job and being paid in a fair manner.
There was a report not too long ago--not this year but a few years
ago--that looked at a State-by-State weekly pay comparison. In that
report, Pennsylvania women made, on average, $694 a week, while men in
Pennsylvania were paid $849 a week--an 18.3-percent differential. But
that is not the end of the story. It gets worse. For people 50 years
and older, just looking at that age category, for women workers 50
years and older in Pennsylvania at that time, just a few years ago, the
differential was $732 and $984 for men--almost $250 a week above in
that age category--and for all women at that time, about $150 of
difference each and every week. Imagine what that does to someone's
sense of achievement or sense of dignity when they know they are doing
the same work every day and they are being underpaid over and over
every week, every month, every year, and in some cases decade after
decade. So when we say this is a matter of justice, in some ways that
might be an understatement.
We have a chance to remedy that, and it is very simple. Are we going
to take steps to remedy that or are we going to reject the steps it
will take to bring a measure of justice, a fair shot for women? They
are not asking for anything that a man wouldn't ask for or demand. They
are just asking for basic fairness--to be treated the same for the same
work.
I won't go into all the elements of the legislation, but some of them
involve what happens in the event of a conflict--if a woman is
discriminated against based upon her pay and she brings an action in a
court, what will be the rules that govern that case. I think we should
do everything possible to make sure that if an employer has a defense,
they have to earn that defense, especially in this kind of litigation.
One part of the legislation prohibits retaliation for employee
complaints. In other words, if a woman is inquiring about or discussing
or disclosing the wages of herself or some other employee, she is not
retaliated against. It is hard to believe we have to legislate and make
that the subject of debate. One would think that if a woman is working
in a company for years and she is aggrieved and has a claim to make and
is asked what the foundation of her claim is, her questions, her
inquiries, her comparisons between and among different sets of data,
what she makes, what a man who does the same work has been paid--that
those basic questions should never, ever be the subject of retaliation
by an employer, but too often they are. So we have to legislate. We
have to specifically prohibit that kind of conduct by an employer, as
maddening and as frustrating as that is.
One would think that employers would want to make things right; that
they would want to make sure that if a man is paid a buck for his work,
a woman doing the same work is paid the same amount. She shouldn't have
to ask. She shouldn't have to be worried about any kind of reprisal or
retaliation or punishment. But the state of the law today is such that
retaliation goes without sanction in the United States of America. It
is very insulting to women and insulting to families.
So there is lots we can do, but the most important thing we can do is
to get a favorable vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act before us. I hope
we get a bipartisan vote. This shouldn't be the subject of support of
just one party. This should be bipartisan. The people who are asking
for this help, who have been asking for it for decades, aren't members
of just one party. They happen to represent one-half or more of the
American people, when women have asked for that.
If any of my colleagues think for whatever reason that this is not
the right thing to do for today, they should do it for future
generations. Do it for your own daughters, your own granddaughters,
maybe your great-granddaughters. But to forgo the opportunity to do
something about this at long last--President Kennedy signed the
original legislation. A lot of people in the United States weren't even
born then. Yet here we are still debating, still striving to get a
basic measure of justice in place. So I do believe equal pay equals
justice.
Afghanistan Elections
Mr. President, I will turn to another subject this evening. I know we
have to wrap up, and I am the last speaker of the evening, but this is
a topic that doesn't get enough attention even though it was the
subject of a lot of coverage and attention in the last couple of weeks
and especially the last couple of days; that is, the elections in
Afghanistan.
Many people know that some of the reporting indicated that the
results were good in terms of turnout. There are a lot of questions to
review, but we don't know the results of the elections. It is, however,
remarkable how the Afghan people turned out to choose their second
democratically elected President. About 60 percent of the 12 million
eligible voters defied Taliban threats to cast their votes. I am
hopeful these elections are a step toward a smoother transfer of power
later this year.
By the way, that voter turnout number in terms of eligible voters is
a little higher than we had in the United States of America in 2012.
Secretary Kerry said last week that this election has been ``Afghan
owned from the start.''
The Afghan government security forces and civil society worked
together to make these elections happen despite concerted efforts by
the Taliban to sow fear and destroy democratic progress.
The service of our men and women in uniform set the stage for this
progress. U.S. training and mentoring helped the Afghan National
Security Forces get to the point where it could secure polling centers
and allow these elections to happen.
We know in 2009 the international security forces bore the brunt of
the election's security efforts, including, of course, American
fighting men and women--our soldiers, at that time.
The State Department, USAID, and NGOs also put a tremendous amount of
work in supporting Afghan institutions
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in this process of carrying out an election.
The role Afghan women played in these elections is particularly
remarkable. In the National Defense Authorization Act's amendment last
year, I urged the administration to focus especially on ensuring there
were enough female poll workers and security personnel to ensure all
Afghan women who wanted to vote could do so safely and without fear of
intimidation.
Female voters turned out in numbers never seen before in Afghanistan,
which speaks to their tremendous bravery and unwavering commitment to
fighting for their rights as Afghan citizens. This is an incredible
number. About one third of the 7 million voters, according to the
reports, were women. Many women were voting for the first time. I don't
have an enlargement, but this is a photograph which appeared a day
after the election which depicts a line of 50 or more women standing in
the rain under a plastic tarp waiting to vote.
The American service men and women and, of course, taxpayers have
made a tremendous investment in Afghanistan to make it the nascent
democracy it is today. From harsh Taliban rule, Afghanistan is emerging
as a fledgling democracy, with tremendous gains in education and health
care.
Just imagine. Girls who were literally at zero in their
representation in schools a little more than a decade ago now
constitute 42 percent of Afghan children enrolled in school. That
didn't happen because of just some policy in effect. There was a lot of
bravery and valor demonstrated by families and by young girls going to
school under terrible threats--threats of death and intimidation. We
all know about the terrible stories of young girls walking or riding to
school and having acid thrown in their faces. Despite specific attacks
on girls or young women, they keep going to school.
It also happened because of the great sacrifice of our fighting men
and women--those killed in action or wounded in action, tens of
thousands of Americans. In Pennsylvania to date we have lost 91
soldiers killed in action and almost 740 wounded in action.
So all of these results--whether it is about democracy or whether it
is about girls in school, women being able to vote, or a range of other
metrics, health care and otherwise--came with tremendous sacrifice, the
kind of sacrifice most of us don't really have a sense of. At least I
don't.
The results will be returned later this month on the election in
Afghanistan. If a runoff is necessary, I hope all parties will work
together to ensure the process is credible, transparent, and free from
violence.
Once President Karzai's successor is in place, the Afghan government
and the Afghan people should move quickly to sign the bilateral
security agreement and affirm the commitments the Afghan government has
made to the international community and, by doing so, recognize the
tremendous sacrifice of our fighting men and women and those of the
coalition forces as well.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record
an article about the election from the New York Times dated April 5,
2014.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the New York Times, Apr. 5, 2014]
Afghan Turnout Is High as Voters Defy the Taliban
(By Rod Nordland, Azam Ahmed and Matthew Rosenberg)
Kabul, Afghanistan.--Defying a campaign of Taliban violence
that unleashed 39 suicide bombers in the two months before
Election Day, Afghan voters on Saturday turned out in such
high numbers to choose a new president and provincial
councils that polling hours were extended nationwide, in a
triumph of determination over intimidation.
Militants failed to mount a single major attack anywhere in
Afghanistan by the time polls closed, and voters lined up
despite heavy rain and cold in the capital and elsewhere.
``Whenever there has been a new king or president, it has
been accompanied by death and violence,'' said Abdul Wakil
Amiri, a government official who turned out early to vote at
a Kabul mosque. ``For the first time, we are experiencing
democracy.''
After 12 years with President Hamid Karzai in power, and
decades of upheaval, coup and war, Afghans on Saturday were
for the first time voting on a relatively open field of
candidates.
Election officials said that by midday more than three and
a half million voters had turned out--already approaching the
total for the 2009 vote. The election commission chairman,
Mohammad Yusuf Nuristani, said the total could reach seven
million. ``The enemies of Afghanistan have been defeated,''
he declared.
But even as they celebrated the outpouring of votes, many
acknowledged the long process looming ahead, with the
potential for problems all along the way.
International observers, many of whom had fled Afghanistan
after a wave of attacks on foreigners during the campaign,
cautioned that how those votes were tallied and reported
would bear close watching.
It is likely to take at least a week before even incomplete
official results are announced, and weeks more to adjudicate
Election Day complaints. Some of the candidates were already
filing fraud complaints on Saturday.
With eight candidates in the race, the five minor
candidates' shares of the vote made it even more difficult
for any one candidate to reach the 50 percent threshold that
would allow an outright victory. A runoff vote is unlikely to
take place until the end of May at the earliest.
The leading candidates going into the vote were Ashraf
Ghani, 64, a technocrat and former official in Mr. Karzai's
government; Abdullah Abdullah, 53, a former foreign minister
who was the second biggest vote-getter against Mr. Karzai in
the 2009 election; and Zalmay Rassoul, 70, another former
foreign minister.
Both Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah praised the vote. ``A proud
day for a proud nation,'' Mr. Ghani said.
Still, a shortage of ballots at polling places was
widespread across the country by midday Saturday, and some
voters were in line when polls closed.
More worrisome, the threat of violence in many rural areas
had forced election authorities to close nearly 1,000 out of
a planned-for 7,500 polling places, raising fears that a big
chunk of the electorate would remain disenfranchised.
But when it came to attacks on Election Day, the Taliban's
threats seemed to be greatly overstated. Only one suicide
bombing attempt could be confirmed--in Khost--and the bomber
managed to kill only himself when the police stopped him
outside a polling place.
In three scattered attacks on polling places, four voters
were reported killed. Two rockets fired randomly into the
city of Jalalabad wounded eight civilians. One border
policeman, in southern Kandahar Province, and another
policeman in remote western Farah Province were confirmed
killed in Taliban attacks, according to preliminary reports.
Bad as all that was, it was a lower casualty toll than on a
normal day in Afghanistan, let alone an election on which
both the insurgents and the government had staked their
credibility. Interior Minister Umar Daudzai said there were
140 attacks nationwide on Saturday, compared with 500 attacks
recorded by the American military in 2009.
In preparation for the election, the Afghan government
mobilized its entire military and police forces, some 350,000
in all, backed up by 53,000 NATO coalition troops--although
the Americans and their allies stayed out of it, leaving
Afghans for the first time entirely in charge of securing
their own election.
``Voting on this day will be a slap in the faces of the
terrorists,'' said Rahmatullah Nabil, the acting head of the
National Directorate of Security, the Afghan domestic
intelligence agency.
Sensitive to concerns about potential fraud--more than a
million ballots were thrown out in the 2009 presidential vote
and then again in the 2010 parliamentary elections--the
police were quick to report their efforts to crack down on
Saturday.
Among those arrested were four people in Khost who were
caught with 1,067 voter registration cards. Several people,
including an election official, were caught trying to stuff
ballot boxes in Wardak Province.
``This has been the best and most incident-free election in
Afghanistan's modern history and it could set the precedent
for a historic, peaceful transition of power in
Afghanistan,'' said Mohammad Fahim Sadeq, head of the
Afghanistan National Participation Organization, an observer
group.
In many places where voting was nearly impossible in 2009,
the turnout was reported to be strong. One was Panjwai
district, a once-violent haven of the Taliban just outside
Kandahar City, where hundreds lined up to vote. ``I left
everything behind, my fears and my work, and came to use my
vote,'' said Hajji Mahbob, 60, a farmer. ``I want change and
a good government and I am asking the man I am going to elect
as the next president to bring an end to the suffering of
this war.''
Even where the Taliban did manage to strike, voters still
turned out afterward. A bomb set off at a polling place in
the Mohammad Agha district of Logar Province killed two
voters and wounded two others, according to the district
governor, Abdul Hamid. ``The explosion dispersed the voters
who were holding their voting cards and waiting to vote,''
said Zalmai Stanakzai, a car repair shop owner who was there.
``Some of us left, the others stayed. I was concerned about
our safety, but we considered voting our duty.''
Insurgents set off a series of five blasts in the Shomali
plain, just north of Kabul city,
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in the village of Qarabagh. ``After the explosions, the
polling stations reopened and people rushed to vote,'' said
Mohasmmad Sangar, 32, a used-car salesman there. ``It was a
great day today.''
Nicholas Haysom, the United Nations' top election official
here, said: ``We know that the Taliban have made a very
explicit and express threat to disrupt it. The failure to
disrupt the elections will mean that they will have egg on
their face after the elections.''
While there were reports of disrupted voting in troubled
places like Logar Province and neighboring Wardak, in Helmand
Province in the south and Nangarhar Province in the east, at
the same time voters were showing up in unexpectedly high
numbers in other places, like Zabul, Uruzgan and Kandahar
Provinces in the south, and Kunar Province in the northeast,
despite strong insurgent presences in those areas.
In Uruzgan, election authorities had to open additional
polling places to accommodate unexpected numbers, while in
Daikundi they ran out of ballots in some remote districts and
election authorities had to race new ones out to them. In
northern Mazar-i-Sharif, voters were still lined up after
dark.
Underwritten by $100 million from the United Nations and
foreign donors, the election was a huge enterprise,
stretching across extremely forbidding terrain. Some 3,200
donkeys were pressed into service to deliver ballots to
remote mountain villages, along with battalions of trucks and
minibuses to 6,500 polling places in all. The American
military pitched in with air transport of ballots to four
regional distribution centers, and to two difficult-to-reach
provinces.
Though many international observers left Afghanistan in the
wake of attacks on foreigners, or found themselves confined
to quarters in Kabul, years of expensive preparations and
training of an army of some 70,000 Afghan election observers
were expected to compensate, according to Western diplomats
and Afghan election officials. ``We have so many controls
now, it's going to be much safer this time,'' said Noor Ahmad
Noor, the spokesman for the Independent Election Commission.
The American ambassador, James B. Cunningham, called the
elections a ``really historic opportunity for the people of
Afghanistan to move forward with something we've been trying
to create together with them for several years now.''
Still up in the air is the question of whether an American
troop force will remain in Afghanistan after 2014. Mr.
Karzai's refusal to sign a long-term security deal to allow
that presence was a major point of tension between the
American and Afghan governments. Each of the leading
candidates has agreed to sign the deal once in office, though
inauguration day may not take place until well into the year.
The election on Saturday was notable also for how many
Afghan women were taking part. More female candidates than
ever before are on provincial ballots, and two are running
for vice president, the first time a woman was ever put up
for national office here, which has generated a great deal of
enthusiasm, especially in urban areas.
At the women's polling station in the Nadaria High School,
in Kabul's Qala-e-Fatullah neighborhood, among those lining
up to vote was a young mother, Parwash Naseri, 21. Although
wearing the blue burqa that is traditional here, she was
still willing to speak out through the privacy mesh covering
her face.
She was voting, for the first time, for her children and
for women's rights, she said, speaking in a whisper. ``I
believe in the right of women to take part just as men do, to
get themselves educated and to work.''
Mr. CASEY. I wish to highlight two quotes. The first is from a 21-
year-old woman who is voting for the first time in this election:
She was voting, for the first time, for her children and
for women's rights, she said, speaking in a whisper. ``I
believe in the right of women to take part just as men do, to
get themselves educated and to work.''
A remarkable inspiration from a 21-year-old woman voting for the
first time in Afghanistan.
The second quotation is from a 60-year-old farmer who was asked by a
reporter what it was like to vote under the threats that were either
proximate--meaning something happening in almost real time or in the
recent past--or just the overall threat posed by the Taliban and other
extremists. This farmer said:
I left everything behind, my fears and my work, and came to
use my vote. I want a change and a good government . . .
He goes on from there to describe what he hopes will happen. But just
imagine that. He said:
I left everything behind, my fears and my work, and came to
use my vote.
When I read that, I thought about something Thomas Jefferson said in
a letter to John Adams when he was an older man. He was describing the
fear of old age--not the kind of fear of reprisal if you were voting
but the fear of growing old. He talked about how he dealt with the fear
of growing old in nautical terms. He said: ``I steer my bark with hope
in the head, leaving fear astern.'' That is all I thought about when I
heard what the 60-year-old farmer said; that even though he had fears--
the fear of death, the fear of reprisal against him, his family or
people in his neighborhood--he was willing to say his right to vote was
so important he was willing to leave those fears and his work behind so
he could vote.
What a tremendous inspiration on a subject--the conflict in
Afghanistan and all which comes from it that often is not the subject
of positive commentary or inspiration. For once and all too
infrequently, this is one of those occasions where we can be positive
about a result.
We have more work to do to make sure the bilateral security agreement
is signed, but we should draw some measure of inspiration from what
happened in Afghanistan and the progress which has been made there.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
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