National Equal Pay Day

Floor Speech

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Ms. MIKULSKI. Yes.

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Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, I come to the floor to join my colleagues in calling for equal pay for equal work for women.

I just left the President of the United States. He is right up the street at the Sewall-Belmont House. This is the home of the National Woman's Party in which so much organizing and strategizing took place to get women the right to vote. The President is there to declare that building a national monument to commemorate the tremendous work that was involved in getting suffrage, under the Antiquities Act, and that is his right to create that.

It is not only the building we want to preserve. It is not only the records of the battle for suffrage that we want to preserve and be able to display. It is what it stands for: the fact that women are included fully in our society.

We had to fight every single day in every single way to be able to advance ourselves. Even when the men were in Philadelphia writing the Constitution, thinking great thoughts and doing great deeds, Abigail Adams was back in New England running the family farm, keeping the family together, and she wrote John a letter saying: Don't forget the ladies because if you do, we will ferment our own revolution.

In our country, we call revolutions social movements where ordinary people organize and mobilize to accomplish great deeds to move democracy forward. It took us over 150 years to get the right to vote in 1920. We are coming up on the anniversary of suffrage, but it is not only that we got the right to vote, it is what that right to vote means. We wanted to be able to participate fully in our society. We wanted to be able to exercise our voice in terms of choosing leaders who will choose the right policies. Along the way, we have been advocating those policies.

In 1963, working with the President, who was committed to civil rights, Lyndon Johnson, the equal pay for equal work act was passed as part of a great step forward in three major civil rights bills. We thought we had settled the issue, but, no, 50 years later we have only gained 19 cents--19 cents. At that rate, it will take us until 2058 to get equal pay for equal work. That is not the way it should be. We need to make sure we eliminate the barriers and impediments that allow this to keep happening.

When we women fight for equal pay, we are often sidelined, redlined, pink-slipped, harassed, or intimidated. We are often confronted with: Why are you doing this? And then we are often harassed for doing it.

People may say: Senator Barb, didn't you take care of that when you passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009. The Lilly Ledbetter legislation, of which I am so proud, has kept the courthouse doors open by changing the statute of limitations, but now we need to pass legislation to end the loopholes that are often strangleholds on women getting equal pay in the first place.

I have legislation pending called the Paycheck Fairness Act. That Paycheck Fairness Act does three things. First of all, it stops retaliation for even sharing pay information in the workplace. Right now, if you ask, you are forbidden to tell, or get fired. If you ask, you are forbidden to tell, or get fired, or if you are a man working side by side with a woman and you want her to know that as a nurse, as a computer software engineer, what your pay is, and there is an opportunity, she could get fired and he could get fired. This is wrong.

We also want to stop employers from using any reason to pay women less, such as he has a better education. Use the same education for the same job. We are willing to compete. We are out there. More women are in college. More women are Phi Beta Kappas. More women are getting ahead.

Then we heard: He has to be paid more because he is the breadwinner. What are we, crumbs? If he wins the bread, we want to be winners too. Very often it is women in the marketplace who are now either the sole breadwinner or also a significant breadwinner, and the men or the partner they love says: We want you to get equal pay for equal work as well.

So we don't want to hear: He is the breadwinner. We don't want the crumbs anymore. We want to be paid equal pay for equal work. We also want punitive damages for women who are discriminated against. Backpay alone is not a strong enough deterrent.

I want my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to know they have ideas. One of my colleagues spoke on the floor earlier today. I have such admiration for her. She is a fine Senator, and she agrees with the thrust of the press conference we had. We have faced this in the past, where we share the same goal, but we differ on means. My means, I must say, are the way forward. These means are the way forward because they solve the problems.

Of course, we will sit down and talk, have conversations, and see what we can do, but at the end of the day, we face this issue: It costs more to be a woman. Women pay more for everything. Women pay more in medical costs than men, given the same age and the same health status. Women pay a significant amount of money for childcare. Guess what. Women get charged more for dry cleaning. We have to pay more for our blouses being cleaned than men to have their shirts washed and pressed.

We are tired of being taken to the cleaners. We want equal pay for equal work. Whether we are U.S. Senators, whether we are nurses or executive assistants or others, we want equal pay for equal work.

We stand with the women's soccer team. They kick the ball around, but we are tired of being kicked around. So give us equal pay for equal work. Pass the Mikulski coeffort to get equal pay for equal work. I think we can then move forward. Why should our women go to the Olympics winning the gold, when they don't get paid the gold? So it is time for a change, time for a difference, and time for something we can do.

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