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.
“WOMEN, WAGES, AND JOBS” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H2942-H2948 on March 27, 1996.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
WOMEN, WAGES, AND JOBS
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 12, 1995, the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia [Ms. Norton] is recognized for 60 minutes.
Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, this special order on women, wages, and jobs comes during Women's History Month, but more pertinently it comes because finally the issue of declining wages in our country has made it onto the national agenda.
The underlying discontent that has been there for two decades have come forward, and we see it in the Republican primaries. It is interesting that at least since the early 1980's many of us have been pointing to this un-American phenomenon where the stock market does well and people do poorly. Somehow or other it never caught on. There has been some attention paid to it as it affects men because the manufacturing sector has been so decimated as jobs have moved offshore. Now that the country is beginning to recognize that something different is happening, it is important that we look at all of those of whom something different is happening, and that is why I choose to raise it in relation to women.
As a former chair of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, I have long had an interest in discrimination against women. More is at work here than simple discrimination, however. What is at work here is the nature of our economy itself, some historic changes that are underway that reflect upon the kinds of jobs that are being produced and who gets those jobs.
The effect is felt in the widest gap in incomes we have seen since we have been keeping these records. We need to look at how this phenomenon affects women in particular because with the change in the economy there have been the greatest changes in women in the work force.
I want to point to a bill I have introduced, the Fair Pay Act, which in its own way is to the 1990's or seeks to be to the 1990's what the Equal Pay Act was to the 1960's.
This body in 1963 passed the Equal Pay Act in order to close the wage gap between men and women, and the Equal Pay Act has done a very good job for its limited mandate. Essentially, it was to look at people doing the same job and being paid differently for it. Some progress has been made, partly because of the Equal Pay Act, so that we have gone from about a 62-percent gap now to something like a 71-percent gap. That is the good news until we hear the bad news.
The bad news is that the closing of the gap itself reflects an alarming decrease in male wages as well as the new presence of highly educated women or highly skilled women in entry-level positions only. In other words, the average woman is just where she was. The average woman is experiencing what the average man is, stagnant or declining wages. But at entry levels, highly educated women like doctors and lawyers make the same as men, although those women have a gap that develops within their profession after the entry level.
I am this evening interested in the average woman, the silent worker out there every day. The Fair Pay Act is directed specifically to her and to part of what she is experiencing.
The Fair Pay Act simply says if you are doing comparable work you ought to get paid the same. The Fair Pay Act says if you are an emergency services operator, that is a female-dominated profession, you should not be paid less than if you are a fire dispatcher, that is a male-dominated profession.
Under the Fair Pay Act if you are a social worker, you would not earn less than a probation officer simply because you are a woman and he happens to be a man. Should not the market set the rates? That is precisely what the Fair Pay Act tries to do, even as the Equal Pay Act intervened in order to have the market set the rates.
Too often the habits of employers over the decades have built in distortions to the market. Women and minorities paid the price in reduced wages.
I want to emphasize that the Fair Pay Act that is H.R. 1507, would not, in fact, intervene into normal market processes, and that has been the problem people thought they saw in comparable worth work.
{time} 2215
My bill would allow the extraction only of the discrimination factor, and the burden would be on the plaintiff, on the woman, as is always the case in discrimination cases, to show that the difference in wage she is experiencing is because of discrimination and not because of unbiased market factors.
I offer that this evening for inspection as one approach to the problem I raise in women and jobs.
I want to move to another remedy as well. We are finally beginning to talk about raising the minimum wage. Here is a subject covered with my mythology. If we are going to talk about women workers, we must talk about the minimum wage. Indeed, if we are going to talk seriously about welfare reform, we must talk about the minimum wage. Who are we talking about when we talk about a minimum wage worker? Some Americans would say, well, I think you are talking about a bunch of teenagers working at McDonald's. The typical minimum wage worker is a white woman over 20 years of age, likely to live in the South, who has not had the opportunity to attend college and who works in a retail trade, agriculture, or service job. That is who the minimum wage worker is. She is your wife and you daughter. She is your aunt and your young friend who has just graduated from high school.
Most minimum wage workers are women; 5.75 million women are paid between $4.25 and $5 per hour. That means 17 percent of all hourly paid female workers earn the minimum age and only the minimum wage. Most female minimum wage workers are not teenagers. They are adults. And when we say women are earning the minimum wage, we are talking about almost certainly the guardians of poor children. Often, most often, these minimum wage workers are women who are raising the poor children.
Now, Mr. Speaker, I am not here talking about the favorite subject of this body, deficit reduction. The minimum wage will add not 1 cent to the United States deficit. What it will do is take 300,000 children immediately out of poverty, 58 percent, almost 60 percent, of minimum wage workers are women. Nearly half of full-time jobs, and the statistics will show that many, if not most, of the others wished they could get full-time jobs, but of part-time minimum wage jobs 15 percent are black, 44 percent of minimum wage workers are Hispanic. What would we do, what would I have us do? Simply to raise the minimum wage to
$5.15 per hour. Is there anybody in this body who would think that is too much for them to earn or too much for anyone they know to earn, too much for any constituent of theirs to earn? It would not have to come in one fell swoop. It could go to $4.70 an hour by July 5 this year and to $5.15 an hour by July 1, 1997.
Understand who we are talking about when we say the minimum wage worker. We are talking about the traditional way in which we have set a marker of what it means to be an American below which you shall not be forced to work. We are talking about a person who works typically 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, and earns $8,840. The impact of lifting the minimum wage would be that immediately 300,000 people, I want to correct what I said before, 300,000 people would be lifted out of poverty; 100,000 would be children. Only one-third of those affected by such an increase would be teenagers, because almost 70 percent of minimum wage workers are 20 years old or older. They are adults going out to work every day with less than a poverty wage. That is who they are.
Since 1979, we have found that 97 percent of the Nation's increase in wealth has gone to the wealthiest 20 percent. The remaining 3-percent increase in wealth is left to the other 97 percent of the Nation's workers, and who has taken the brunt are those at the very bottom.
The value of the minimum wage has dropped 30 percent, my colleagues, since 1979. I want to put this graphically to you. I want us to face who we are talking about. Let us look at a family of four and consider what would happen if the sole earner is a minimum wage worker above the poverty line. The current poverty line for a family of four is $15,600. Now, if that family of four has one worker earning the minimum wage,
$4.25 an hour, working full time the year around, about $8,500 a year, that worker would receive a tax credit, thanks to legislation passed by this body, if we do not cut it terribly much, and there are proposals to cut it, but today that worker would receive a tax credit of $3,400 under the 1996 provisions of the earned income tax credit.
That worker is so poor, that worker, single wage earner in a family of four, that she could collect food stamps worth $3,516. She would nevertheless still pay $650 in payroll taxes after qualifying for benefits and paying her payroll taxes. This family ends up $834 below the poverty line.
This is America, my friends. We cannot continue to send people to work every day, working hard, working in work you do not want to do and I do not want to do, and have them come home below the poverty line. That is dangerous. You are hearing the rumblings of it out there in the Republican primaries. Answer the call now.
In every State there will be large percentages that will benefit from an increase in the minimum wage. In my own city, a fairly small percentage, 7.8 percent, would benefit, and as I look at what would happen in some of the States, I am simply amazed. Idaho, almost 14 percent of the workers would benefit. In Louisiana, almost 20 percent of the workers would benefit. In Michigan, 10.5 percent; in Mississippi, 17 percent of the workers would benefit. In North Dakota, 18.2 percent of the workers would benefit.
I see my good friend and colleague from Georgia, Representative McKinney, here. In Georgia, 11.9 percent of the workers would benefit. Very substantial percentages all across the United States, regardless of sex, regardless of your preconceptions about the place, regardless of whether you think of it as a poor State or a rich State, you have substantial proportions of the population that would immediately benefit from a raise from the minimum wage, not 1 cent added to the deficit, a sharing of income of the kind that has been typical in the United States that as companies become more prosperous there is a greater sharing of the profits with the workers. That is what has not been happening. That is why we are having a growing income gap.
The number of African-Americans who would benefit is important to note. Seventeen percent of all hourly paid African-American workers are minimum wage workers, and most of these low-wage workers are female. Twenty-one percent of all hourly paid Latino workers are minimum wage workers. And Latino women are especially likely to be paid very low wages; 25 percent of hourly paid Latino women earn at the minimum wage.
Now, I want to examine the critique of an increase in the minimum wage that is most often made, and that is that you reduce job opportunities. The answer is that that is not the case. I refer to nearly two dozen independent studies that have found that the last two increases in the minimum wage had a insignificant effect on employment. The Nobel Laureate economist Robert Solow recently told the New York Times that the evidence of job loss is weak, and I am quoting him,
``The fact that the evidence is week suggest that the impact on jobs is small.'' Prof. Richard Freeman of Harvard said the following: At the level of the minimum wage in the late 1980's, moderate legislative increases did not reduce employment and were, if anything, associated with higher employment in some locales. We remember the 1980's, do we not, when there was a plethora of minimum wage jobs breaking out all over in this country? Minimum wage seems not to do what the conventional wisdom tells us. Kind of look at the facts. We have got to look at the studies.
There is also the myth that the blow will be to small businesses. First of all, 90 percent of workers in small business already earn more than the current minimum wage. Do not think that people in small businesses are simply looking for the cheapest labor they can find. They are looking for the best labor they can find. They have got to have people who give them the biggest bang for the buck. In any case, the law does not apply to businesses that do not have annual sales in excess of 4500,000 or employees that participate in interstate commerce. You have got to be in that category even to be covered. That means that many small businesses are simply not affected by the minimum wage at all. Ninety percent of workers in small businesses earn more than the current minimum wage. Indeed, half of minimum wage workers work in firms with more than 100 employees. That is cheating workers.
What this means is, we are giving a break to moderate and larger employers, because we are allowing them to hire people at minimum wage and keep more of the profit for themselves and they pass that on to us, ladies and gentlemen, because those people qualify for supplemental welfare, those people qualify for the supplemental benefits, food stamps and the rest. So go right ahead the way you are doing it, because what is means you are doing when you are allowing people to pay the present minimum wage is your are subsidizing that employer yourself. That is us, we, the taxpayers.
{time} 2230
That is us, we, the taxpayers. Let them pay for the labor. Business is doing well. President Clinton has had an extraordinary effect on the stock market because of the way in which he has reduced the deficit. That is one of the factors that is yielding large gains in the stock market.
Where are those gains reflected in the pay envelope of the minimum wage worker? Why should the taxpayers subsidize that worker with food stamps or other supplements, rather than have the employer, who has profited from that worker pay? Let that employer pay.
This line is stark enough so that even without it being a big poster, I think I will make my point that a higher minimum wage does not cost jobs. This is the job level in 1991. This is the job level in 1996 since the last minimum wage increase. What we are seeing is there has been an extraordinary rise in jobs.
By the way, many of these are part-time, temporary, low-wage jobs. Whatever happened to the notion that if you raise the minimum wage, you will not make jobs? This is what has not been proved. This is the myth that is helping to sustain the minimum wage.
This is the myth that means the taxpayers are supplementing people who should be paid for their labor by the companies, almost all of them larger companies, or certainly medium-sized companies at least for whom they work.
Let me take a pause now, because I am very pleased to see that the gentlewoman from Georgia has come to the floor. I am very pleased to welcome the gentlewoman from Georgia, who always does her homework, and who has joined me in this special order.
I yield to the gentlewoman from Georgia, Representative Cynthia McKinney.
Ms. McKINNEY. Thank you very much. I certainly want to commend you for the role that you play in terms of being a role model for the newer Members and for people like me who have long looked up to you and now find myself working right next to you. I just want to say thank you for your leadership.
I have got some posters that I think punctuate what you have said. Here I have a chart that shows how from 1979 to 1995 the wages of men have decreased. The wages of women increased, and then began to decrease. The gap that was closing between men and women was basically because the wages of men were dropping.
Then, of course, as you have pointed out, the income gap. We have not seen the kind of income gap that we are experiencing now since the days just prior to the Great Depression. Here we see that the top 25 percent receive more than 95 percent of the income growth. The other 75 percent of Americans receive less than 5 percent of the income growth. Meanwhile, the top 5 percent of American families got more than 40 percent of America's growth.
Just as you so correctly pointed out about the impact that the President's policies have had on the deficit, the decrease in the deficit, and Wall Street, Wall Street sizzles, and Main Street fizzles.
I have another chart. Again, as you so correctly point out, the subsidies, the social safety net that we have painstakingly constructed or woven, is there because there are some corporations that are getting away with not paying their fair share. Certainly they are not paying their workers what they are worth. What we have seen here just in terms of the corporate income tax is that corporate income taxes have gone down, and, of course, individual income taxes have had to take up the slack.
In the previous special order we had one of our colleagues discussing about the diet that he was on, trying to lose 50 pounds, and he was going to lose 2 pounds and then save the other 48 pounds for the last 2 days of the diet.
Well, I think that is about the way the Republicans have run this ship of state, because they in their budget put off the hard decisions until the out years. But the Progressive Caucus has come up with a budget plan that does not put off the hard decisions into the off years. It goes right in by cutting defense spending and cutting corporate welfare. We demonstrate that you can have a downward trend, a steady downward decline in the deficit, if you make the hard choices, and you make them early.
So basically I would just say that when the economy is bad, nothing else is good. The work that you have put together with the legislation will improve the lives of working women all over this country.
I come from a family where my mother worked. She worked for 40 years at Grady Memorial Hospital as a nurse. I am a single female head of household, and I am a working woman. I suspect that if my son grows up and marries, as I suspect that he will, he will also marry a working woman.
We just want to make sure that the leadership of this country is aware and sensitive of the needs of working women, and that is what your legislation provides for.
I would also say, as the only one in the Georgia delegation, that after we were elected, we had women come to our office for issues that ranged from access to credit, to child support enforcement, to sexual harassment, and even something as simple as a role model who showed to them that, yes, it could be done.
So just as we plead with our colleagues to make sure that the plight of working women is not forgotten, we plead for ourselves, and I commend you for your legislation and the work that you do as a role model for the rest of us.
Ms. NORTON. I want to thank the gentlewoman not only for those very kind remarks, and coming from her they are treasured, but also for that very compelling statement. I very much appreciate her coming forward, particularly this late in the evening. But we have got to use what opportunities we have in order to make these important points at this critical time.
Let me continue then. What has happened to women? The gentlewoman from Georgia indicated that women were in fact beginning to improve, and that is true. But women have now been caught in the same spiral that has dragged men's wages down, and that is why we have really got to step up and take notice.
Until the 1970's women came into the work force drawn there by rising real wages. In order words, they came into the work force because they could earn more money and they were drawn to the work force by virtue of the lure of greater income.
Since the 1970's, there has been sluggish wage growth. Still they come. They come because they must. They come even though the wage gap for them, for the average one of them, is not closing.
Now, it is very interesting, in the 1980's we did see a rather precipitous narrowing of the wage gap. It is not altogether clear why, but we do know this, that 50 percent of the gap remains unexplained. We believe that possible explanations may be occupational segregation, women's jobs versus men's jobs, you are in a woman's occupation. That has typically had low-wage discrimination. Women having secondary rather than primary jobs, internal labor market influences.
In any case, the figures tell you about the creation of a whole new work force in our lifetime. In the 1950's, 30 percent of the work force was women. Today, 45 percent of the work force is women. In other words, we have come to the point where half of the people who go to work every day are men and half of the people who go to work every day are women. Yet the reward of wages is simply not there for the average woman.
Indeed, if we look at where women are employed, the lower the earnings, the greater percentage of women in that occupation. That is whether they are making goods or performing services.
Why are women working? I can tell you this much, they must be working, because there is no other choice, because half of all married women with children under 3 are in the labor force. Few women, unless they are highly educated and making a lot of money, and that is rather few, are going to go to work if they have a child under 3. In the 1970's, it was not half of all married women, it was a quarter. That means we have doubled. They are there because they have to be there. They are there because they are single head of household, or they are there because one wage earner cannot do it any longer in a family of two wage earners.
Women are to the new service economy what men were to the economy of the Industrial Revolution. Let us face it. That is what women are. We have fueled the new economy with women. Except in a very real sense, they look exactly like the male industrial workers, low paid, poor benefits of the 19th century. The conversion is itself remarkable. The conversion I speak of is in the economy itself, which has prepared the way to accept women workers.
In the 1960's three-quarters of all the nonfarm job creation was in services. That is a lot. But by the 1970's, 80 percent of all the nonfarm job creation was in services. By the 1980's, 100 percent of all the net job growth was in the services. Four out of every five women work in a service job.
What do I mean by a service job? Because what I mean by a service job is in fact or tells in fact the story of declining and low wages.
{time} 2245
A service job for a woman is a fast-food job. It is a job in a department store. It is a job as a health aide. It is a job as an insurance company clerk. It is a job in residential day care. It is a job as a beautician. It is a job as a clerical. The next time you go into the department store, look at that woman. Look at her closely, and you will know what I mean.
Mr. Speaker, the interesting thing is that historically, women tended to be in school and hospital jobs. There are proportionally few workers there because there are so many other workers in these other service jobs now that they have overwhelmed these school workers and the hospital workers, but watch out.
The school workers and the hospital workers very often were teachers and nurses, and those are relatively high-paid women's jobs, compared with health aides, insurance company clerks, fast-food clerks and department store clerks. These are honorable jobs. These are often good jobs. They just do not pay well. They do not pay what they are worth.
Listen to your constituents. They are hurting. They are hurting because they are not earning what they are worth. We have the only answer, is to get a greater sharing of the benefits of the labor with those who perform the labor. That is the American way, and unless it works that way, you get a disgruntled working class. There is no getting around it. You cannot continue to have a democratic society with a greater and greater share of the wages going to the top and almost none going to those at the bottom.
Now, do we have a situation where the money simply isn't there, that is the problem? That, my friends, is not the problem. You need only open your paper and look at what the stock market is doing, and you will see that the money is there. If anything, downsizing should have resulted in workers who were there getting paid more. It did not. That is why many companies are taking a second look at downsizing, because they have done it on the cheap. They have done it at the expense of workers and have not, in fact, increased productivity, have not done it the old-fashioned way, the American way.
Mr. Speaker women have become the indispensable new workers who are fodder for the new economy. The last time the country needed the kind of labor supply we have gotten from women in the last two decades were, No. 1, at the time of the great immigration from Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century and No. 2, at the time the black workers in the South left and came North. Today, instead of asking workers to come from Europe or Asia to the United States, and of course there are many immigrants who come, instead what we are saying is, look at your own household and send a worker out for the new economy. If you are going to send a worker out for the new economy from your own household, then should not that new worker be paid what that new worker is worth?
Listen to your constituents now. Hear the cry. I say to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, listen to your own primary. I never thought I would live to see a Republican sound like a labor Democrat, but I think that is what I heard Pat Buchanan sounding like. Now, that is not his tradition, and that is not the way he has run his political life, but I do think he heard something out there. We all better listen to it.
Whenever we have listened, we have found a remedy. This is not susceptible to yesterday's ideology or even tomorrow's. This is a new problem in the United States. When wages are low, the economy is bad. When wages are high, the economy is good. What is this new phenomenon? The economy is good and wages are low. Should not work that way.
Mr. Speaker, one of the things we can do, if it is working that way, is to look at the minimum wage, which has simply lost its value, and say pay people a little more to work. If you do not, you discourage work and then, of course, my friends get up on the House floor and say why do they not work? If it does not pay to work, how can we expect people to work?
This is America. This is America at the turn of the century. This is a country that must not send people to work only to have them come home poor. That is what is happening.
Economists tell us that there are a number of explanations for the low wages of women in particular. Typically, we are told that a reason for these low wages is crowding or concentration in traditional women's occupations. There may be some of that, but recent studies look to other answers. There was crowding in men's occupations. They had low skills, and yet in manufacturing, they had high wages. Why? My friends, the economists say it was because they were unionized. When the company would not share the profits, men went out and unionized. Women have not done that, and that may be part of the reason the economists tell us that they have not been able to extract a fair share of the profit of their labor from their employers.
We are also told that a reason is low capital investment in the industries in which women work. Even though we may not find the real answer any time soon, we need to look for a remedy very soon. We cannot allow the United States to become a place where you develop a permanent working class or, God forbid, what appear to be the case in many of the inner cities, a permentnt lumpenproletariat, people who never move up. Those would be the homeless, the people who are chronically or constantly unemployed. A greater and greater proportion of our population falls into this category.
This has never been that kind of European-class society. It has been a society where, however poor you were, you could look forward to being better off than your father. You may have been poor, but not as poor as he was. So there was steady progress, and a man could live to see a man who picked cotton live to see his son or daughter go to college. Today, people go to college on college loans and come back home to live because they cannot afford to strike out on their own, the way their parents did.
Mr. Speaker, this is a new America. This is not our America. We do not have all the answers to this America, but we do know this. Surely one of the answers, not maybe, but one of the answers surely is to give back at least some of the value to the minimum wage. It will have an effect, not only on those low-income workers, but it will have something of a ripple effect on those who are nearly as badly off, and you will not know the difference. You will not know it in the deficit. The businesses is question will hardly know it, because a few cents from their profit will go to their workers instead. Who among us would wish for any less?
Mr. Speaker, I recognize that the notion of the minimum wage, or for matter, my Fair Pay Act, are matters that have tended to divide Republican from Democrat, but it was in a Republican primary that one heard this cry first, and it was a Republican candidate that has tried to respond to it. He has responded to it in ways which many, not only in his own party but in mine, simply cannot agree. But he has heard something real. This body must hear something real. It is there. Do not deny it.
Do not tell low-paid workers who go to work every day that something will happen if you only wait for the economy to fit my paradigm, whether it is your flat-tax paradigm, your national sales tax paradigm or, for that matter, paradigms from my side of the aisle, such as stimulation paradigms. People need hope and relief now.
The minimum wage is traditional to American life. Even on the other side of the aisle, few say we should abolish it. There are some, but few. If we put to a vote today to abolish the minimum wage, I believe those of us who say keep it would prevail. The real question is, are you going to keep it at a level that is worthy of the name minimum wage? So far, we have not, and we are going to pay very severe consequences if we do not.
Among other things, any welfare reform bill we pass will come back to hit us in the face because the people on welfare will come back to claim other benefits because they will not be able to earn enough to pay the rent and to put food on the table.
So I come forward this evening to talk about women's wages in particular, and that is not because I think the problem of men's wages is any better. In fact, it is worse. Men have fallen out of the labor force at an astounding rate because of the decline in the manufacturing sector. Men have experienced an extraordinary reduction in their annual wages over the last quarter of a century.
Mr. Speaker, I have come to the floor this evening to talk about women because I do not intend for women to be lost in this debate. Because if you do not speak up for women, they surely will be lost in this debate. The Women's Caucus found them lost in the health debate before we spoke up, as we did today when we introduced the Women's Health Equity Act. Before we spoke up about breast cancer and osteoporosis and, for that matter, clinical trials for women with heart disease, before we spoke up, they got lost in the health debate. We do not intend them to be lost now that the country has heard some voices that say we work every day and it is getting worse.
I come to the floor this evening to say I hear you and I believe that many on both sides of this body hear. They heard it on the other side in their primary. We hear it on this side, as well. Doing something about it through the minimum wage, as a first step, is a good-faith way to say we hear you. We are going to respond not in a radical departure from what we have always done, but in the tradition that we have always used, in an increase in the minimum wage that will give you a small raise in your pay envelope.
Remember that these minimum-wage workers pay the same social security taxes that the rich do, and the difference in the impact on their pay envelopes is gargantuan. They need a break. They need a raise. Many of them are women, and the majority, the great majority, of those who earn the minimum wage are women, and they are the people who take care of your children. They are the people of the next generation. Hear them. Receive them. Respond and remedy.
Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Speaker, I take this opportunity, as organized by my valued colleague, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, to address the economic condition of women, the jobs that they do and have, and the wages that they receive in relation to the general pool of wage earners. Some of us have been deeply concerned by the deteriorating economic status of the vast majority of workers, citizens, in this country. Although this fall from economic grace began about 16 years ago, the cumulative effects of this steady drop are now beginning to be painfully felt by the majority of job holders.
The experience and story of one of my constituents, whom I shall call Geraldine Mason, is descriptive of many other people in my district and throughout the United States.
Ms. Mason has one pre-school child. She works in a produce market and tries to work at least 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, but can only get about 32 hours of work a week. She gets more than the minimum wage,
$5 an hour. Her wage is a bit higher because the San Francisco bay area is one of the most expensive places to live in the United States. When she is lucky and works a steady 50 weeks in the year, her total income is $8,000 a year. After taxes, her take home pay is $7,710.
She shares an apartment with her sister; Betty's share of the rent is
$250 a month or $3,000 a year.
Of course she needs child care. Although she is on several lists for the few subsidized child care slots in the area, there are needier cases than hers--women who have even less income. So she pays something nominal, $100 a month, $1,200 a year to members of family who are available. Her share of the utilities, telephone, and garbage comes to
$55 or $660 a year.
Her job is 5 miles from home and she uses public transport. She can't afford the monthly pass, so she pays $1.25 per trip which adds up to
$625 a year. Her food comes to $900 a year; supplementary medical care
$299 a year; incidentals, $600 a year. Total: $7,710 a year. This income is augmented by the Earned Income Tax Credit which is under attack.
We are citizens of the United States and are indeed blessed and fortunate to be in a land of agricultural wealth, with human and other resources of which we are justifiably proud. Although we suffer natural calamities--floods, droughts, and earthquakes--we are large enough so that by pooling our national resources we have been able to absorb such shocks better than most nations. We have indeed been blessed to not be in permanent drought as is an increasing band of land in the sub-Sahara region or in the frozen tundra of Russia. We are a wealthy nation.
Why then, should Geraldine Mason, who wants to work and does work; who is a responsible mother and a tax-paying citizen, pushed up against an impossible wall to scale? What do we, the lawmakers and the law implementers tell Geraldine Mason how to survive in this economy?
``Between 1979 and 1991, families headed by people under 25 years old saw their incomes drop $7,200 a year from $24,000 to $16,800 * * *.'' Even the better established 25-34-year-olds suffered an income drop of
$4,000 going from $35,600 to $31,500 during this period. There are about 20 million workers in the United States in Betty Mason's situation.
We know that at differing levels, college graduates, postgraduate, and professionals are beginning to feel the simultaneous crunch of income maldistribution, loss of jobs, and job insecurity.
On maldistribution, 1 percent of American households, with net worth of at least $2.3 million each, owns nearly 40 percent of the Nation's wealth; the top 20 percent of American households, with net worth of
$180,000 or more, have more than 80 percent of the Nation's wealth; this figure is the highest of all industrial nations.
At the bottom end of the scale, where Geraldine Mason is stuck, and many single, divorced women with children are, the lowest earning 20 percent of Americans earn only 5.7 percent of all the after-tax income paid to individuals in the United States.
According to Marion Anderson, as published in ``Running Up the Down Escalator,'' an Employment Research Associates report,
ENTRY LEVEL WAGES 1979 AND 1991
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
High school graduates College graduates
-----------------------------------------------------
All Men Women All Men Women
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1979...................................................... $8.32 $9.39 $7.12 $11.32 $12.57 $10.07
1991...................................................... 6.48 6.90 6.02 11.30 11.39 10.75
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is another worker: Susan Casavant lives in Vermont, in Congressman Sanders' district. She presented her story to the Progressive Caucus panel at the March 8, 1996, hearing on ``The Silent Depression, the Collapse of the American Middle Class'' on her work in Vermont. She states
I feel as if I am a good worker, I've been quite flexible and displayed responsibility and honest work. I have learned how to work in almost every department. Other employees depend on me in order to receive their work. I believe I pull a heavy load, both in and out of work.
I have such a hard time making a living because Peerless Clothing pays poverty-level wages!! Why?
She makes $5.25 an hour, up 25 cents an hour from the $5-an-hour starting wage.
. . . I work 40 hours per week plus overtime and Saturdays. My less than $200 a week check makes me feel like a fool. . .
. It's still hard to make a good living. I still live with my family because I can't afford to pave my own road. . . . The insurance provided to us costs $41.70 per week for me and my son, that's about $168 per month and the worst part is that it doesn't cover half of the things me and my son need. I never thought my future could look so uninviting, I am twenty-one years old and I still depend on my parents; my mother cares for my son because I can't afford a good, safe day-care.
I live in America, the land of freedom, so how do big companies like these get away with bringing down honest people and their hometowns too? I would like to live in security instead of doubt.
When Susan Casavant and other workers tried to form a union, the company said that it would close or move.
What does the 104th Congress say to her?
This is what we can say: American workers need a raise. American workers, who are among the world's most efficient and productive, need to have some sense that they can learn, work, and make a living wage. This Nation needs our workers, and our economy needs their work and needs their buying power.
In this Congress, I am proud to be a cosponsor of three bills raising the minimum wage: Mr. Gephardt's H.R. 940 which raises the minimum wage to $4.70 an hour; Mr. Sanders' H.R. 363 which raises the minimum wage to $5.50, and Mr. Sabo's H.R. 619, which raises the minimum wage to
$6.50 an hour. It is clear from the rosy picture of our economy that the growth is on the increasingly bowed back of our increasing pool of low-paid workers--a disproportionate share of whom are women.
Franklin D. Roosevelt understood the experience, the lives, the misery of the people struggling to find work and income in the 1930's. As Roosevelt led this country to victory by successfully calling on our sense of national pride, by calling on our sense of fairness and democracy, our sense of justice, he was proud to declare in 1944, and much of the Nation thrilled to hear him declare, his Economic Bill of Rights.
Section 2 of this declaration states the U.S. policy of ``The right to earn enough to provide for an adequate living.''
Space limits me from quoting the other sections which gave Americans in 1944 and later, such a sense of empowerment and self-respect, empowerment and self-respect that we are now losing, and with it our sense of pride in ourselves and each other.
Twenty three of us in the 104th Congress can say and have said that we can make a living wage and that there can be jobs at decent wages for all who want to work and can work. This statement is embodied in H.R. 1050, A Living Wage, Jobs for All Act, which I was proud to introduce with 22 cosponsors; among them Eleanor Holmes Norton.
It will represent a new contract with our people--one that answers Geraldine Mason and Susan Casavant as to how they can have pride in their work and share equitably in the benefits of our wealthy Nation.
During the 104th Congress many of the ideas can be developed, improved upon, sharpened, critiqued, and openly discussed around the country in public meetings, and by the end of the year brought together into a whole legislative package to be reflected in a new budget for the 105th Congress.
I respectfully urge my distinguished and hard-working colleagues to join me in developing a process which will give our citizens new opportunities for economic security and which will hold out hope for women that they can be made full partners in this economic security.
Ms. JACKSON LEE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleagues in the Women's Caucus for calling attention to the issues facing women in the work force and the difficult work they have done to celebrate this year's Women's History Month celebration. I am delighted to participate in this discussion of women, wages, and jobs, because it is an issue that has become increasingly important to us all, as women are now an integral part of the American work force.
First of all, let me commend the millions of women who juggle the dual role of homemaker and breadwinner, as well as those who choose homemaking as a career--for in our society every woman has a crucial role to play.
From the beginning of time, women have performed tasks which were crucial to the economic and social development of our society. At one time, we were only allowed to become educators nurses, seamstresses, and hairdressers, yet today we have expanded our roles to include doctors, lawyers, judges, administrators, and yes we have conquered the sciences as well. And so I say to the women of America, ``you've come a long way.''
Yes, we have come a long way, and my colleagues and I serving in the 104th Congress bear witness to that fact, yet we have so much farther to go.
On Friday March 8th, women across the globe celebrated International women's Day. A day which was set aside to mark the beginning of the struggle for equality and rights for women. In many countries, it was a day mixed with celebration and protest. Celebration for the many economic, social, and political obstacles we have successfully overcome, and protest for the ongoing inequalities and barriers that continue to deny us full participation in society. Yet in America, International Women's Day went literally without notice. Did we fail to recognize this day because we have conquered all the obstacles or is it because we have fallen down on the job?
Mr. Speaker, I submit to you that in spite of the strides that have been made, until we eradicate pay inequalities, the glass ceiling, sexual discrimination and the myriad of other problems facing working women, our battle is far from over.
A recent report from the U.S. Department of Labor's Glass Ceiling Commission shows that women represent over half of the adult population and nearly half of the work force in America. Women compose half of the work force, yet we remain disproportionately, clustered in traditionally ``female'' jobs with lower pay and fewer benefits. These studies show that women who make the same career choices as men and work the same hours as men often still advance more slowly and earn less.
Women remain underrepresented in most nontraditional professional occupations as well as blue collar trades. Consider the following:
Women make up 23 percent of lawyers but only 11 percent of partners in law firms, women are 48 percent of all journalists, but hold only 6 percent of the top jobs in journalism, women physicians earned 53.9 percent of the wages of male physicians, women are only 8.6 percent of all engineers, women are 3.9 percent of airplane pilots and navigators; and in dentistry, women are over 99.3 percent of hygienists, but only 10.5 percent of dentists.
The report found that although the pay gap for women narrowed significantly in fields such as computer analysts, it widened in others. They show that in 1993 women earned only 72 percent of the wages paid to men. This wage gap is worse for women of color. White women earn 72 cents per every dollar made by white men while African-
American women earn 64 cents and Latino women earn a mere 54 cents.
Mr. Speaker, working women in this country have been fighting for equal pay for equal work for over 20 years now, and although the gap is closing, it is not happening at the rate any of us should be pleased with. When this government exposes civil or human rights violations in other countries, we are quick to impose sanctions to encourage people to remedy their behavior, yet when companies within our own borders continue to violate these same rights, we turn our heads, and say, ``these things just take time.'' Well, how long will it take before working mothers can actually support their children, without the extra assistance from family, or government.
In closing, I would thank to Rep. Norton for allowing me the opportunity to speak on this issue.
____________________
