President Obama is conducting a series of town halls with women about the success of Obamacare as well as the need to create equal pay for equal work. He traveled to Charlotte, NC and took questions from the BlogHer and SheKnows communities.
While Obamacare is not perfect, it is a step in the right direction towards the goal of healthcare becoming a basic right. The White House notes that 30 million people can no longer be denied healthcare due to a preexisting condition. Around 105 million people can no longer be kicked off their health plan because they have outlived the lifetime of their plan. 76 million Americans are benefiting from preventative health coverage. And 16 million Americans who had not had health coverage have now gained it.
But now, the next step is to create equal pay for equal work for women. In addition, there has to be more paid sick leave as well as more money for early childhood education.
White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett wrote on BlogHer that there are a lot of statistics that are concerning.
The main statistic is that women are likely to lose out on $420,000 during their lifetimes because they do not receive equal pay for equal work. There are a number of reasons for this, including out and out sexism as well as more subtle factors such as women dropping out of the workforce because they do not have a way to get affordable childcare.
And if people are serious about reducing the budget deficit, they should get on board with achieving equal pay. Jarrett, in her piece, notes that if we were to succeed, it would boost the GDP by $1.5 trillion. That would be $5,000 for every man, woman, and child in this country. That means more tax revenue so that the government can run surpluses instead of deficits.
Jarrett notes:
In fact, the US is falling behind its peers in keeping women in the workforce. In 1990, the United States ranked 7th out of 24 current developed countries reporting prime-age female labor force participation, about 8 percentage points higher than the average of that sample. By 2013 the United States had fallen to 19th out of those same 24 countries. A recent study found that the relative expansion of family leave and part-time work programs in other developed countries versus the United States explains nearly one-third of the United States’ relative decline.
There are several things we can do to help achieve equal pay.
The first is passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. The Alice Paul Institute (not to be confused with either Ron or Rand Paul) quotes that Justice Scalia as saying that he doesn't believe that the Constitution prohibits discrimination against women even with the 14th Amendment. And furthermore, the institute notes that the 14th Amendment has never been interpreted to guarantee equal rights for women in the way that an ERA would. Back in the 1970's, when the ERA was finally sent to the states for ratification, we had not thought through some of the implications of an ERA, such as serving in the military, for instance. Now, however, we know that women are very much capable of serving in the Armed Forces. 35 of the necessary states have ratified the ERA. If three more were to ratify it, the
Alice Paul Institute notes that Congress can still certify it as having been properly ratified:
A 1921 Supreme Court decision (Dillon v. Gloss) recognized that Congress has the power to fix a definite time limit for ratification; it also pointed out that an amendment becomes part of the Constitution once ratified by the final state constituting a three-fourths majority of the states. The Dillon Court said that an amendment should be ratified within a "reasonable" and "sufficiently contemporaneous" time frame "to reflect the will of the people in all sections at relatively the same period," because the amendment process is presumably triggered by a perception of "necessity" with respect to the subject of the amendment.
A 1939 Supreme Court decision (Coleman v. Miller) reaffirmed the power of Congress to fix a reasonable time period for ratification but also determined that Congress has the power to promulgate an amendment after the final state constituting a three-fourths majority ratifies. In Coleman, the Court held that Congress, upon receiving notification of ratification by three-fourths of the states, may determine whether the amendment is valid because it has been ratified in a reasonable period of time, or whether "the amendment has lost its vitality through lapse of time." The Court called the timeliness decision a "political question" and said that Congress is uniquely equipped to make that decision because of its "full knowledge ... of the political, social and economic conditions which have prevailed during the period since the submission of the amendment."
One of the reasons that we don't have equal pay is because of inadequate enforcement. The government has paid lip service to equal pay for a long time.
However, the EEOC does not have teeth to enforce the law:
Equal pay laws, such as the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, exist at the federal level. But Dr. Gatta says work must be done on the enforcement end to make a real difference. Similarly, Dr. Brodsky describes the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as a toothless oversight agency with limited power to investigate complaints and assess fines.
"It's on women to go and be the whistleblower, the policeman, and pay for legal action. It's impossible," she says. "When you utter the words 'gender discrimination,' immediately, retaliation goes into high gear."
The problem is that most people do not have the time or money for costly litigation. And people who are retaliated against will have a hard time finding employment elsewhere. And I suggest that President Obama's
own policies jailing whistleblowers serve to discourage it at the workplace level. After all, it sets an example for corporations to follow.
A third solution would be for Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act.
Congress should adopt The Paycheck Fairness Act. This Act would:
Strengthen the protections guaranteed by the Equal Pay Act, passed in 1963.
Close a loophole in defenses employers may assert for pay differences between men and women.
Prohibit retaliation and strengthens penalties for equal pay violations.
Authorize additional training for Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) staff. The EEOC is the government agency that enforces federal employment discrimination laws.
This legislation, proposed by Women Vote, would fix a lot of loopholes in the original Paycheck Fairness Act and strengthen the EEOC's enforcement power.
Many employers, as the Roosevelt Institute notes, conceal unequal pay scales by contractually forbidding employees from discussing pay with other employees.
According to IWPR, nearly half of all U.S. workers are either contractually forbidden or strongly discouraged from discussing their pay with coworkers. While there isn’t a direct link between pay secrecy and the wage gap, the gap persists despite the fact that the Equal Pay Act of 1963 prohibits employers from paying women less than men (and vice versa). As IWPR writes, this is in many ways because “in practice, employer policies regarding pay secrecy, including threats of retaliation, make it difficult for workers to discover pay discrimination and effectively use these rights.”
Not only is this action designed to perpetuate sexism in the workplace, it is unconstitutional because it is designed to suppress free speech rights. A fifth solution, as noted in the same link from the Roosevelt Institute, is to create more unions.
For starters, unionization is associated with a lower pay gap. The gap starts to close among men and women who belong to a union compared to those who don’t — unionized women earn 87.8 percent of men’s wages versus their non-union counterparts who earn 79.9 percent. IWPR’s research shows that unions also help to reduce pay secrecy: half as many unionized workers as nonunion workers are discouraged or prohibited from sharing that information with coworkers. But unionization rates have been flat in recent years and have fallen significantly in recent decades. And more men than women are unionized. That gap has been shrinking since the 1980s, but mostly due to a falloff for men. Increased unionization could be a powerful tool for women to use against employers who discriminate in pay, but the trend in the country is going in the opposite direction.
Union membership, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has continued to decline during the Obama administration, a trend that has continued since the early 1980's, when the government first started keeping track.