Norton Commemorates Equal Pay Day with Bill to Bring Women's Pay Up (4/28/09)
Norton Commemorates Equal Pay Day with Bill to Bring Women's Pay Up to Today's Economic Challenges
April 28, 2009
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), who enforced laws for equal rights for women as chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), today commemorated Equal Pay Day by introducing the Fair Pay Act (FPA) to take the EPA to the 21st century level. She also urged the Senate to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act passed by the House in January.
"With Senator Tom Harkin, we again introduce the FPA to pick up where the Equal Pay Act leaves off," Norton said. The FPA takes on sex segregated jobs where gender influences wages and leaves the average woman worker without any remedy for equal pay. "If a woman is an emergency services operator, a female-dominated profession, for example, why is she often paid considerably less than a fire dispatcher, a male-dominated profession?" Norton said. "Is this because each of these jobs has been dominated by one sex? The Fair Pay Act does not decide this issue, but the bill does allow women to show that some or all of the wage disparity is gender-based. However, as with the EPA, the burden is entirely on the female plaintiff to prove her case." Norton said that in "a market economy, this is a difficult case to make," but women should not be denied a vehicle for taking on deliberate gender-steering, wage-setting by gender and sex segregation in the workplace." Norton said the Senate could easily pass one of the first bills passed by the House, the Paycheck Fairness Act (PFA), which is an update of the Equal Pay Act (EPA) this year.
The first bill that President Obama signed was the Lilly Ledbetter bill to restore the interpretation that the EPA had had since it was enacted in 1963. 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." "That bill could not wait the four months until Equal Pay Day," Norton said. Equal Pay Day marks the day into the new year - today, nearly four months later than men - that women must work to make a wage equal to the wage earned by their male counterparts last year.
Rosa DeLauro, Norton, and scores of Members worked to pass 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 EPA to meet our changed economy where women work as much as men, especially in today's troubled economy when women are supporting many husbands, sons, and 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 Equal Pay Act when she chaired the EEOC.