[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 5]
[Senate]
[Pages 6635-6636]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                               EQUAL PAY

  Mr. ENZI. A few minutes ago, we concluded the vote on H.R. 2831 that 
came after a very short debate. It was a clever use of the rules by the 
majority, I have to hand them that. There is a requirement that there 
can be only 1 hour of debate before the cloture vote. So we didn't have 
any session today until 5 p.m. The Senate was closed. That is an 
interesting way to limit debate. As I noted in my earlier remarks, the 
bill we voted on also didn't come to committee and follow the regular 
order.
  I am very proud of the fact that Senator Kennedy and I are able to 
work out a lot of things on a lot of bills. In fact, I think we hold 
the record for major bill passage. The way we were able to do that is 
to work in a very bipartisan way. We have worked out difficulties and 
sometimes we have compromised and sometimes we have left things out so 
things could get done. On this bill, we never had that opportunity. We 
never had that courtesy. We never got to debate this for 1 minute in 
committee mark-up, let alone on the floor.
  The debate was kind of fascinating to listen to because there is 
equal pay, which all of us are in favor of; and there is the pay gap, 
which all of us want to close. But the discussion ranged between the 
two, making them sound like they were the same thing. I want people to 
be clear that they are not. When we talk about women as a whole in the 
United States getting 23 cents per hour less than men do, we are not 
talking about equal pay for equal jobs; we are talking about pay for 
jobs that are not equal. We have held some hearings in our committee on 
this, and they have been very enlightening. If a person takes what is 
considered a traditional job--if a woman takes a traditional job--the 
jobs don't pay very well. If a woman takes a nontraditional job, they 
pay very well, just like the men who are doing that job. But they are 
not traditional jobs for women. Somehow, we have to move women from 
those traditional jobs, where there is overemployment, to some of the 
nontraditional jobs where there is underemployment.
  One of the fascinating people who spoke at our committee was a young 
lady who became a mason. She puts rocks on buildings, and she was proud 
of the work she does, and she should be. She started out paving, then 
later adding some marble steps, then adding pieces to buildings, and 
then doing high-altitude work. And I want to tell you, she makes more 
than I do because she does something different than most people do, and 
it pays well.
  We have this thing in America where we say there is this kind of job, 
and these are the people who ought to take those; and there are these 
other jobs, and you are probably not qualified for those. Well, when 
does that qualification happen? Throughout life. We have to be training 
people and encouraging people to do better things.
  In order to encourage that kind of training we had the America 
COMPETES Act which we passed last year. It puts an emphasis on science, 
technology, engineering and math so that people can become doctors and 
engineers, and other high-paying jobs. We ought to get more people into 
these fields, but what we are getting now is fewer and fewer people 
into them. We are facing a shortage in those fields, except for the 
fact that we can bring people in from other countries who can do those 
because they are turning out a lot of people with the necessary skills.
  I have asked the reason for that, and the answer is that they do some 
things we are never going to do in this country. I went to India 
recently and learned a lot about their education system. They promise 
that every kid gets an education through sixth grade, but they do not 
follow that promise. Only 20 percent of the girls get an education at 
all. They also have this little review at fourth grade to see if people 
are interested in education, and if they determine that you aren't they 
kick you out of school. Now, that is before sixth grade. That is fourth 
grade. They kick them out of school. Those people will make $1 a day 
for the rest of their lives. At sixth grade, they have another purge 
and even more people are kicked out of school. We would never stand for 
that. Those people will make $2 a day the rest of their lives. Now, in 
most of the world, poverty is $1 a day, so they are above the poverty 
line, although they wouldn't be in the United States. So India only 
lets 7 percent of the kids go to college--just 7 percent. Again, we 
would never stand for that. We keep trying to figure out how to get 
more and more people into post-high school education, and that includes 
career and vocational education. And we need to do that. But in India, 
part of people's incentive to get into science, technology, 
engineering, and math is that those are the jobs that pay well. One 
person in India told me: We don't have professional sports teams, so 
there aren't any kids out there who are bouncing a basketball or 
throwing a pass or doing any of the other things that a lot of American 
kids are doing and thinking they are going to get to go pro. Some 
American kids think they are going to go pro and think they will make 
about $18 million a year. It is not going to happen for most of them.
  I really appreciate the NCAA's ads running now that show a whole 
bunch of people in different professional sports, and they say there 
are 380,000 young people who are in college sports, and every one of 
them will go pro but not in their sport. That is the important line on 
it: not in their sport.
  Somehow, we have to get more people involved in the sciences so they 
have the basic knowledge in grade school, which will allow them to 
excel in high school, which will allow them to do well in college and 
then allow them to get into the higher paying jobs. Men and women have 
equal talent in all of those areas. What we have to

[[Page 6636]]

do is encourage that equal talent equally.
  I have been trying to get the Workforce Investment Act through here, 
and I have gotten it through the Senate twice unanimously, but there 
hasn't been a willingness to go to conference committee with the House. 
I asked why, and I was told: Well, we are afraid of where the 
conference committee might go. There is no reason for that fear right 
now because the same people who were afraid of where it might go would 
be in charge of the conference committee now. If they are in charge of 
it, they could make sure it doesn't go anywhere they do not want it to 
go.
  If we can pass that bill, it will provide the flexibility that will 
allow 900,000 people a year to train for higher skilled jobs. For many 
women, that will narrow the pay gap. They can go into other kinds of 
jobs that they may have been precluded by other events in their lives 
from ever getting into. If we want to narrow the wage gap, there are a 
number of ways to do that, but it means we have to get women into areas 
they haven't been traditionally working in before. That is the best 
solution to the wage gap argument.
  Part of the difficulty in passing a bill around here is having a 
chance to work on the bill. The bill that came before us earlier today 
passed the House after being allowed only one hour of debate. Using 
their rules, the majority made sure no one was allowed to amend it. 
Now, it comes over here and bypasses the committee. The way we usually 
work a bill is for the chairman of the committee and the ranking 
member, Senator Kennedy and myself, to sit down and list out some 
principles that we have to check with the rest of the committee to see 
if they match the problem we are trying to solve. After we have those 
principles, we plug in details and see if we have the details right. 
Then we call in the stakeholders, which is really anybody interested in 
that issue, and we see if they agree with it.
  We have found that when we can get agreements with the people on the 
committee and the stakeholders, we have the answer right. And most 
people in this body agree we have it right because most of the bills 
that get worked out this way get passed unanimously. A long debate for 
a bill that comes out of our committee is probably 2 hours.
  We are going to have one of those tomorrow. It will be genetic 
nondiscrimination, a very important bill which, first of all, allows 
people to take advantage of the Genome Project. For example, if you are 
having your blood checked you can find out your genetic framework, 
which can tell you things that could happen to you in the future. And 
if you know they could happen to you in the future, you can take 
actions to keep them from ever happening.
  This bill requires that if you have a genetic marker indicating that 
something could happen to you, your insurer is not allowed to make it a 
preexisting condition and your employer is not allowed to fire you over 
it. The bill will offer real protection that can ultimately help people 
live healthier longer.
  The Genetic Non-Discrimination bill went through the whole process 
that I have described. It has even been preconferenced with the House 
side. So we are pretty sure that once it finishes here it will go right 
over to the House and the House will take care of it too. That doesn't 
mean we left the House and the House committee out of the process. We 
let them into the process. We let them into the process early so that 
everybody would know what was happening. But that hasn't been the case 
on H.R. 2831.
  I am disappointed that there wasn't the need, the courage, the desire 
to see what the principles are on this issue and see if we could 
actually solve the problem. We can build a good case for equal 
employment because we have always voted for equal employment. We will 
all vote for equal employment. We all want to close the pay gap. That 
is a bit tougher to do, but we can do it if we work together. If we 
don't work together and use issues like this to score political points, 
it will be like so many bills that come over here and get debated for 
long periods of time and nothing ever happens to address the issue. The 
most productive place to address tough issues is the committee. In the 
committee, you can have a couple of people interested in one part of 
the issue go off by themselves and come up with a solution. Quite 
often, it isn't the polarized one the Republicans have or the polarized 
one the Democrats had. What it becomes is the third way, and that 
eliminates the clash of the two polarized sides.
  There are so many things around here that have been debated so long 
that if you mention a term from that issue, you get instant rebellion 
from both sides. I have watched that so many times, people hear a word 
and jump into the weeds arguing about the broader application of that 
word and keeping the discussion from actually getting to the principle 
that is trying to be solved.
  So there is a way to get these bills done, but it isn't through 
``gotcha'' politics. It isn't by just bringing things here without 
consulting the other side to see if there are any small corrections or 
maybe even big corrections that can be made. And, as I said before, I 
happen to be disappointed that after all the cooperation we have had in 
the committee on other difficult issues, that there wasn't even an 
opportunity for cooperation in the committee on this one.
  I believe there are some solutions out there, but they are not going 
to be arrived at on the floor of the Senate. What happens here on the 
floor is that both sides bring a series of amendments that we think 
will put the other side in a bad light if they vote against it. It 
isn't just one side that will do it, both sides will do it. So we need 
to have a little more civil way of solving this problem, and I have 
confidence it can be done.
  I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

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