Norton Commemorates Equal Pay Day with Bill to Bring Women's Pay into the 21st Century
Norton Commemorates Equal Pay Day with Bill to Bring Women's Pay Into the 21st Century
April 12, 2011
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), who enforced laws for equal rights for women as the first female chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), today commemorated Equal Pay Day by introducing the Fair Pay Act of 2011 (FPA), to bring the Equal Pay Act (EPA) in to the 21st century.
"With Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), we reintroduce the Fair Pay Act to pick up where the Equal Pay Act and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act left off," Norton said. The FPA takes on sex-segregated jobs, where gender influences wages and leaves the average female worker without any remedy for equal pay. "If a woman is an emergency services operator, for example, a female-dominated profession, why is she often paid considerably less than a fire dispatcher, a male-dominated profession?" Norton asked. "Is this because each of these jobs has been dominated by one sex?" The FPA would not decide this issue, but it would allow women to show that some or all of a wage disparity is gender-based. However, as with the EPA, the burden would be entirely on the female plaintiff to prove her case. Norton said, "In a market economy, this is a difficult case to make, but women should have the ability to take on deliberate gender-steering and wage setting by gender in the workplace."
The first bill President Obama signed into law upon taking office was the Lilly Ledbetter Act, to restore the 1963 interpretation of the EPA. Although highly successful for close to 20 years, Norton said, the EPA had "grown so creaky with age that the Ledbetter Act could do no more than resuscitate the old EPA."
Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), Norton, and scores of other Members also introduced today the Paycheck Fairness Act, which allows class actions, allows employees to share information about work without retaliation by employers, and, in other ways, conforms the EPA to new procedures reflected in other civil rights statutes. Both bills seek to update the EPA and adapt it to today's economy and workplace. "We have long passed the time to amend the Equal Pay Act to meet our changed economy, where women work as much as men, especially in today's troubled economy when women are supporting husbands, sons, and entire families," the Congresswoman said.
The FPA is an important procedural update of the EPA's basic procedures, giving them "the same muscle" as other anti-discrimination statutes, including Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, both of which Congresswoman Norton administered along with the EPA when she chaired the EEOC.