Norton, Former EEOC Chair, Testifies on Two Equal Pay Bills (4/24/07)

Norton, Former EEOC Chair, Testifies on Two Equal Pay Bills on Equal Pay Day
April 24, 2007

Washington, DC-In marking Equal Pay Day, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), the first women to chair the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), today called for closing the unfair wage gap between women and men, as she testified at a House Education and Labor Committee hearing on the Equal Pay Act (EPA), and introduced the Fair Pay Act (FPA). Norton, cosponsor of the Paycheck Fairness Act (PFA), also spoke this afternoon at the "Women Work! Pay Them Fairly!" rally sponsored by The National Network for Women's Employment on the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol.

Today's hearing was the first ever held on equal pay since Norton joined Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) in introducing pay equity bills 10 years ago. Both bills seek to update the 1963 EPA and adapt the law to today's economy and workplace. In addition, the Norton/Harkin Fair Pay Act seeks equal pay for women for the comparable work men perform. The Paycheck Fairness Act 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, all of which Congresswoman Norton administered along with the Equal Pay Act when she chaired the EEOC. Unlike other anti-discrimination laws, the EPA has fallen into disuse because its procedures are antiquated and offer no incentive for women to file complaints. Only 364, an average of 24 EPA lawsuits a year, were filed by the EEOC from 1979 to mid-2003. In her hearing testimony, Norton said that while the EPA once had been a highly successful civil rights law, it is "an old fashioned statute, too creaky with age to be useful."

Norton said that there has been some progress, but achieving equal pay for comparable work continues to be a major problem because of gender segregation in the jobs that women and men do. For example, 2/3 of white women, and 3/4 of African American women work in just three areas: sales and clerical, service and factory jobs. "Only a combination of more aggressive strategies can break through the ancient societal habits present throughout human time the world over as well as the employer steering of women into women's jobs that is as old as paid employment itself," Norton said.

The FPA recognizes that if men and women are doing comparable work, they should be paid a comparable wage. If a woman is an emergency services operator, a female-dominated profession, for example, she should be paid no less than a fire dispatcher, a male-dominated profession, simply because each of these jobs has been dominated by one sex. If a woman is a social worker, a traditionally female occupation, she should earn no less than a probation officer, a traditionally male job, simply because of the gender associated with each of these jobs.

Norton said that the best case for a strong and updated EPA occurred here in the Congress in 2003, when the women custodians in the House and Senate won an EPA case after showing that women workers were paid a dollar less for doing the same and similar work as men. Had they not been represented by their union they would have had an almost impossible task of using the rules for bringing and sustaining an EPA class action. Norton said that the FPA simply modernizes the EPA statutes of the 1960s to bring it in line with later passed civil rights statutes.

"We introduce these two bills every year. This year we should start with the Paycheck Fairness Act and then move on to the Fair Pay Act," Norton said. "Congress should be ashamed to let another year go by while working families lose more than $200 billion annually-more than $4,000 per family-because even considering education, age, hours worked and location, women are paid less than they are worth. Let's start this year to make pay worthy of the American women we have asked to go to work."