After 50 Years at Forefront of Fight for Equal Pay, Norton Celebrates Obama’s Breakthrough Equal Pay Executive Actions on Equal Pay Day, Calls on Congress to Pass Legislation to Bring Equal Pay Act into 21st Century
WASHINGTON, DC – With Equal Pay Day tomorrow, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), who enforced both the 1963 Equal Pay Act and the 1964 Civil Rights Act as the first female chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), issued a statement today on President Obama’s executive actions for equal pay for women and transparency in the workplace, which he will announce tomorrow. Norton also called on Congress to pass two equal pay bills – the Paycheck Fairness Act, of which she is an original cosponsor, and the Fair Pay Act, which she introduced last year with Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) – to begin to help equalize pay in jobs of comparable worth. Equal Pay Day marks extra number of days since the beginning of the year that the average American woman would have to work until in order to earn as much as her male counterpart did in the previous year.
One of the executive actions will be a presidential memorandum requiring the Secretary of Labor to collect data on how much federal contractors pay their workers, organized by sex and race – information the federal government has never before required from any employers. The other executive action will be an executive order prohibiting federal contractors from retaliating against employees who voluntarily decide to discuss their compensation, which may help workers understand whether they are being paid according to applicable laws.
Norton’s statement follows.
“The President is using his executive authority to move women’s pay into new territory by tackling barriers to information that has been closed off to the public. Both the Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act require reporting on hiring and promotion by race and sex, but neither requires reporting on wages. The President’s presidential memorandum applies only to federal contractors, but they are a significant portion of the U.S. employers today. With this executive action, along with the President’s executive order barring contractors from retaliating against employees who discuss their compensation, the President is bringing the first transparency in U.S. women’s history to the veiled area of wages. It has been impossible to move the disparity in earnings between men and women – a woman’s 77 cents to a man’s dollar – where it has been stuck for years. What we have not known about women’s earnings has hurt them. The President’s action to expose the recalcitrant problem of unequal pay should awaken Congress to update the Equal Pay Act to meet our country’s 21st century women, who, today, define themselves by their jobs as much as men.”
Published: April 7, 2014