The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“EQUAL PAY DAY” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the Senate section on pages S3894 on April 19, 2005.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
EQUAL PAY DAY
Mr. CORZINE. Mr. President, I stand today to speak in support of an issue that affects every woman in this country--the fight for equal pay for men and women.
Today is Equal Pay Day--the day when the wages paid to American women
``catch up'' to the wages paid to men last year. So, essentially, women have to work almost four months more than men who do the same job just to bring home the same amount of income.
Until the early 1960s, newspapers published separate want-ads for men and women. Some newspapers even printed the same job in the male and female listings, but with separate pay scales. Full-time working women would earn on average between 59-64 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earned doing the exact same job.
Finally, in 1963, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act making it illegal to pay women lower rates for the same job strictly on the basis of gender. Since its passage, we have made significant progress in the fight for equal pay. Women now earn 76 cents for every dollar earned by a man in the same position.
While we have improved over the last 40 years, however, we still have a long way to go. Apparently this Administration, however, thinks we can stop fighting for equal pay. The Department of Labor quietly eliminated its Equal Pay Matters Initiative, removed all information about narrowing the wage gap from its Web site, and refused to use available tools to identify violations of equal pay laws.
Today, we teach our young girls that they can be anything they want to be, that no job or career is out of their reach. What we do not tell our young girls is that once they get that job and start their career, they will make 24 percent less than their fellow male coworker even if they do the same exact and work just as hard. And if they are women of color, they will make 34 percent less. If the U.S. Department of Labor thinks that this is acceptable, then we may as well tell those young girls to stop dreaming because their work will not be valued as much as their brother's will.
I think we should continue to encourage women who are in the workforce and young girls who will be in the workforce that working hard will payoff. That is why I am proud to be a co-sponsor of two bills that will move this country toward equal pay for women--Senator Clinton's Paycheck Fairness Act and Senator Harkin's Fair Pay Act.
The Paycheck Fairness Act will enforce equal pay laws for Federal contractors and prohibit employers from retaliating against employees who share salary information with their co-workers. This bill also addresses what is known as the ``negotiation gap.'' Women are eight times less likely to negotiate their starting salaries then men. In order to empower women to negotiate their salaries, the Paycheck Fairness Act creates a training program to help women strengthen their negotiation skills. Finally, the bill requires the Department of Labor to continue collecting and disseminating information about women workers.
While the Paycheck Fairness Act addresses pay inequity among men and women for performing the same job, the Fair Pay Act addresses the problem of women not getting paid what they are worth for doing jobs that may be different than those performed by men, but are of equal value to the employer. The Fair Pay Act requires employers to provide equal pay for jobs that are comparable in skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions. The Fair Pay Act would apply to each company individually and would prohibit companies from reducing other employees' wages to achieve pay equity.
This issue is not just one of equality among men and women--it is a bread-and-butter issue for working families. According to the National Women's Law Center, if working women earned the same as men, those who work the same number of hours; have the same education, age, and union status; and live in the same region of the country, their annual family incomes would rise by $4,000 and poverty rates would be cut in half. As we all know, family earnings determine where and how a family lives, the education of their children, the family's health care, their standard of living, including whether workers have a pension on which to retire comfortably. We're talking about serious consequences to this pervasive problem.
Since the beginning of my tenure, I have been very involved with this issue. When the administration wanted to eliminate the Equal Pay Initiative within the Department of Labor's Women's Bureau, I wrote a letter to President Bush expressing my outrage at the Department's actions. In addition, I was also a co-sponsor of the Civil Rights Act of 2004, which included the Paycheck Fairness Act.
I commend my colleagues, Senator Clinton and Senator Harkin, for their commitment to the equal pay issue. I am proud to join them as co-
sponsors of the Paycheck Fairness Act and the Fair Pay Act. I believe that these two pieces of legislation will help put an end to the pay disparity between men and women and bring us closer to the year when we celebrate Equal Pay Day on January 1.
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