[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 4]
[Senate]
[Pages 5847-5849]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             EQUAL PAY DAY

  Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, today is Equal Pay Day. I mentioned that 
to someone earlier and they said: What does that mean? What that means 
is an American woman working full time in America today--I am talking 
about an average American woman working full time, year-round--had to 
work all last year and up to today of this year to earn what the 
average male made last year up to December 31. That is what Equal Pay 
Day is. Think about that. A man gets paid up to December 31, and a 
woman has to work all that year and up to today to get the same pay.
  It is shocking that in 2014 that is still happening in America--
shocking--because we passed the Equal Pay Act in 1963. In 1963, a woman 
made about 60 cents on the dollar for what a man made. Today, it is 77 
cents, so I guess we can say we have made some headway. So 1963, 1973, 
1983--in 40 years, we have gone from 60 cents to 77 cents.
  What we found out, through our committee hearings of the committee I 
am privileged to chair, the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and 
Pensions, is that a lot of employers in this country are not abiding by 
some of the provisions of the Equal Pay Act. I compliment Senator 
Mikulski, who is a member of our committee as well as the Chair of the 
full Appropriations Committee, for her leadership in bringing this 
bill, the Paycheck Fairness Act, to the Senate.
  When we passed it in 1963, 25 million female workers, as I said, 
earned about 60 cents on the dollar. Now it is 77 cents. Again, the 
deficit and what it means for a lifetime of earnings is startling. Over 
the course of a 40-year career, women, on average, earn more than 
$450,000 less than men. And get this: Women with a college degree, or 
more, face an even wider gap of more than $700,000 over a lifetime 
compared with men with the same higher education. So, again, the 
consequences are enormous, impacting not just women but their families 
as well, and not just impacting women during their working lives, but 
keep this in mind: When a woman is making that much less, then a woman 
is getting that much less in her retirement, in her Social Security, or 
maybe her 401(k), or a defined benefit, whatever it might be. So women 
get whacked twice during their working life and then when they retire 
because they have made substantially less than men.
  Again, I congratulate Senator Mikulski for bringing this bill forward 
and for her indefatigable work on this issue. It is time to pass the 
Paycheck Fairness Act. It is simple, commonsense legislation to make 
sure we have procedures and processes that are in place, to make sure 
the Equal Pay Act, passed in 1963, has some teeth, so employers can't 
just skirt around it anymore, and so there will be avenues for

[[Page 5848]]

women to take to make sure they are not discriminated against in terms 
of pay.
  For example, right now it can be a violation of company policy if a 
woman wants to talk to another person about what their salary is. Some 
companies say employees can't do that. This bill says, yes, employees 
can do that. Employees can talk to someone else. They don't have to 
tell--we don't force anybody to tell what their salary is--but an 
employee can make inquiries and can discuss it with other fellow 
employees, and an employer cannot retaliate against an employee for 
doing that. That is a huge step forward, by the way: a little bit of 
transparency, a little bit of knowledge that a woman can have to 
understand whether she is being discriminated against in her 
employment.
  Of course, we have a good deal of anecdotal evidence and many 
examples of employers retaliating against women for discussing salary 
information. So this bill is long overdue and we need to pass it.
  We can't just stop there on this paycheck fairness bill. We have to 
pass it and then we have to do a few other things. We have to tackle 
the more subtle discrimination that occurs when we systematically 
undervalue the work traditionally done by women. The fact is millions 
of female-dominated jobs--jobs that are equivalent in skill, effort, 
responsibility, and working conditions to similar jobs dominated by 
men--pay significantly less than male equivalent-type jobs. For 
example, why is a housekeeper worth less than a janitor? Think about 
it: Eighty-four percent of the maids such as those who clean our rooms 
in hotels--are female; 75 percent of janitors are male. While the jobs 
are equivalent in terms of skill, effort, responsibility, and working 
conditions, the median weekly earnings for a maid are $399. For a 
janitor, it is $484.
  Truckdrivers--a job that is 96-percent male--have median weekly 
earnings of $730. In contrast, a childcare worker--a job that is 93-
percent female--has median weekly earnings of $390. Why do we value 
someone who moves products more than we value someone who looks after 
the safety and well-being of our children? I am not saying that 
truckdrivers are overpaid; I am just saying that jobs we consider 
``women's work'' are often underpaid, even though they are equivalent 
in skills, effort, responsibility, and working conditions. Quite 
frankly, some of the jobs women do, such as nursing or home health 
aides, require a lot more physical effort than being a truckdriver. 
Maybe in the old days truckdrivers had to be strong to muscle those 
trucks around. Now everybody has power steering and power brakes and 
everything else. A person doesn't have to be some big, heavy-weight 
giant to drive trucks anymore. But to be a nursing aide, if you are 
rolling people who weigh over 250 pounds and doing other things, that 
can take quite a bit of effort. So why are nursing and home health 
aides paid so much less than truckdrivers?
  That is why in every Congress since 1996 I have introduced the Fair 
Pay Act, which would require employers to provide equal pay for 
equivalent jobs. My counterpart in the House is Delegate Eleanor Holmes 
Norton, and together we have introduced it in every Congress since 
1996. It requires employers to provide equal pay for jobs that are 
equivalent in skills, effort, responsibility, and working conditions, 
but which are dominated by employees of a different gender, race, or 
national origin.
  People may say maybe that is a stretch. Well, in 1983, the 
legislature of my State of Iowa, working with a Republican Governor, 
passed a bill stipulating that the State of Iowa could not discriminate 
in compensation between predominantly male and female jobs. They had to 
pay equivalent wages. So they hired Arthur Young & Company and they 
evaluated 800 job classifications in State government and, finally, in 
April of 1984, determined that 10,751 employees should be given a pay 
increase. Since 1984 in Iowa we have had that equivalency.
  In Minnesota, our neighbor to the north and the neighbor of the 
Presiding Officer to the east, they went even a step further. Minnesota 
at that time passed a bill providing for equivalent pay not only in 
State jobs but clear down to the local level. That was in Minnesota. So 
it can be done. The women in this country are currently being paid less 
not because of their skills, not because of their education, working 
conditions, or responsibility, but simply because they are in what we 
call female-dominated jobs. This bill would make sure they receive 
their real worth. It will make a huge difference for them and their 
families who rely on their wages.
  What my bill would do basically is require employers to publicly 
disclose their job categories and their pay scales. They wouldn't have 
to publish what every employee is making; they would have to say here 
are our job classifications and here are the pay scales in those job 
classifications. So it would give women information about what their 
male colleagues are earning or anyone who is in that pay scale, so they 
can negotiate a better deal for themselves in the workplace. Right now, 
women who believe they are a victim of pay discrimination must file a 
lawsuit and endure a drawn-out legal discovery process to find out 
whether they make less than the man working beside them, but with 
statistics readily available, this could be avoided. The number of 
lawsuits would go down if employees could see upfront whether they are 
being treated fairly.
  Several years ago our committee had Lilly Ledbetter come and testify 
before our committee. We had provided her with a copy of the Fair Pay 
Act that I have been introducing since 1996, and she took a look at it 
and its description. I asked her, if the Fair Pay Act had been law when 
she was hired, would it have obviated her wage discrimination case. She 
said with the information about pay scales the bill provides, she would 
have known from the beginning she was a victim of discrimination and 
could have tried to address the problem sooner before it caused a 
lifelong drop in her earnings and before she had to go all the way to 
the Supreme Court to make things right.
  So, again, it is time to get done and put some teeth in it, but it is 
time to take the next step, because the biggest gap right now between 
what women make and what men make--among the various known reasons for 
the gap, like education, race, union status, and work experience--is 
occupation; that is, the number of women who are in what we have 
traditionally known as women's jobs--housekeepers, maids, child care 
workers, nurse assistants, and so on. It is time to take the step that 
my State and Minnesota--and there are other States; I just mentioned 
those two because I am familiar with them--have taken to address this 
problem of equivalency.
  The next thing we need to do to make sure Equal Pay Day is not today 
but is December 31, like when men get paid for a full year, is to raise 
the minimum wage. Hopefully, we will be voting on that soon to raise 
the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour.
  Again, the majority of low-wage workers are women because of the 
trends I just mentioned. Jobs primarily held by women are undervalued 
and underpaid and most of the low-wage workers are women. So again we 
have to raise that, and we need to raise tipped wages.
  Tipped wages right now are $2.13 an hour. It has not been changed 
since 1991. Who are most of the tipped workers? Women, and many of them 
are providing income for their families, for their children. I said 
this the other day to a group and they were astounded. They thought I 
must be wrong about it, but I am not wrong. Do you know how someone 
gets classified as a tipped worker? A lot of people do not know this. 
How does someone get classified as a tipped worker? Under the law, if 
their employer says they make more than $30 a month in tips, they can 
be classified as a tipped worker. Think about that, $30 a month.
  Let's say if someone works 5 days a week and they are working 20 days 
a month, that is $1.50 a day. If they get $1.50 a day in tips, they can 
be classified as a tipped worker and they can pay them $2.13 an hour--
unconscionable.

[[Page 5849]]

  It has not been raised since 1991. Our minimum wage bill, which we 
hope to have on the floor shortly, would raise that tipped wage over 6 
years from its present level to 70 percent of the minimum wage, and 
then it is indexed for the future.
  So there are three things we need to do: pass the Paycheck Fairness 
Act championed by Senator Mikulski, address and pass the Fair Pay Act, 
and raise the minimum wage. If we do those three things, Equal Pay Day 
will not be today, it will be December 31 for everybody.

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