Senator Harkin Fights for Fair Pay
Press Release
Senator Harkin Fights for Fair Pay
U.S. Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) released the following statement today in anticipation of Fair Pay Day tomorrow, April 22. Fair Pay Day marks the day of the year a woman's earnings catch up with a man's earnings from the previous year.
"It is unbelievable to me that, more than four decades after passage of the Equal Pay Act and the Civil Rights Act, women are still making only 77 cents, on average, for every dollar a man makes. In Iowa, the wage gap is even worse. Iowa Workforce Development found that, across all industries, women in Iowa make less than 62 percent of what men make.
"Sometimes discrimination is brazen and in-your-face, like with Jim Crow and apartheid. And sometimes discrimination is silent and insidious. This is exactly what is happening, today, in workplaces across America.
"Millions of female-dominated jobs - social workers, teachers, child-care workers, nurses, and so many more - are equivalent to male-dominate jobs. But they pay dramatically less.
"Pay discrimination is a harsh reality in the workplace, and it is not only unfair, it is also demeaning and demoralizing. Individual women should not have to do battle in order to win equal pay. We need more inclusive national laws to make equal pay for equal work a basic standard - and a legal right -- in the American workplace."
Fair Pay Day coincides with Senate action on a legislative "fix" for a controversial Supreme Court ruling that narrowed an employee's right to sue over employment discrimination. Specifically, the Fair Pay Restoration Act addresses the Supreme Court's decision in Ledbetter vs. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. that Lilly M. Ledbetter, a supervisor at the Goodyear Tire plant, could not sue for pay discrimination because she did not file her claim within 180 days of her pay being set.
Harkin is also the author of the Fair Pay Act which requires that employers provide equal pay for equivalent jobs and disclose pay scales and rates for all job categories at a given company. The bill would give women the information they need to identify discriminatory pay practices - reducing the need for costly litigation in the first place.
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