Sharyn Tejani, Senior Policy Counsel

Congress has only a few weeks left before it adjourns for the election – and the Senate still hasn’t taken up the Paycheck Fairness Act. Time is running out, and women deserve – and need – fair pay.

But if we don’t pass the Paycheck Fairness Act before the new Congress convenes in January, we’ll have to start from scratch. A new Congress means we’ll have to re- introduce the bill, push it through House and Senate Committees and then push for a full vote – if we’re able to get that far.

If the Senate votes now, we can get the job done .

That’s why we – along with allies across the nation – are in the midst of a week of action on Paycheck Fairness. Here are a few fun and easy ways you can tell your Senators to vote for the Paycheck Fairness Act!

1. A phone call speaks louder than a thousand emails. We’ve made it easy: Just call 1- 877-667-6650 and follow the instructions.  The system will find your Senators for you and give you tips on what to say.

2. Take action on Facebook! Encourage key Senators to help us pass the Paycheck Fairness Act this September by writing a message on their Facebook walls. We are focusing on four key Senators: Jim Webb (D-VA), Mark Warner (D-VA) , Byron Dorgan (D-ND) , and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX). The beauty of it: you don’t have to be their constituent to post on their wall. Click here for instructions >>

3. Tweet! Tweet! Twitter can be a fantastic way to spread the word. The key? Using hashtags that ensure that your tweet will show up in many searches, and including the Twitter ‘handles’ of the Members of Congress you’re addressing – which ensures that your tweet will show up in their feed. Please use the #fairpay hashtag in all your tweets, and encourage your followers to retweet!

Here are some example tweets (OR, follow us on Twitter and simply retweet us!):

Natl gender #wagegap of $10,000+/yr – Pass the Paycheck #Fairness Act! #fairpay @senatorreid

@senbennelson @joelieberman

Pls RT: Pass the Paycheck Fairness Act! @senatorcollins @ussenscottbrown @senatorreid @senbennelson @markwarner @joelieberman @lisamurkowski

African Am. women need #fairpay! w/o  #wagegap, African Am. families cld afford extra 3 yrs worth of food/ 2yrs of rent http://bit.ly/cQeKvS

Wage Gap Hurts Hispanic Women & Families! w/ #fairpay, Hispanic wmn wld have extra $24,174/yr http://bit.ly/b6C5xY

The wagegap in VA: w/o the gap, women could afford two yrs’ worth of food or 14 mths of rent http://bit.ly/9qa9aL @markwarner

Thanks for everything you do! Together, we can make change happen.

Sharyn Tejani, Senior Policy Counsel

In 1963, the Equal Pay Act, which prohibits employers from paying women less than men for the same work, became law. A lot has changed in the workplace since then.  But the Equal Pay Act is still pretty much the same as it was 47 years ago.  That is a big part of the reason women working full time are still only paid 77 cents to a man’s dollar—and women of color are paid even less.  Because the Equal Pay Act hasn’t kept up with new civil rights laws or been updated to reflect new workplace realities or reverse harmful court rulings, the Act is hardly ever enforced.  That means employers can easily get away with paying different wages to women and men who are doing the same job. In fact, the law is so weak that employers often find it cheaper to discriminate than to pay fair wages.

Americans are fed up with this status quo. Last month, in a nationwide poll of registered voters, 84% said they supported “a new law that would provide women more tools to get fair pay in the workplace.” Participants were told that the “law will also make it harder for employers to justify paying different wages for the same work and ensure that businesses that break the law compensate women fairly.” 72% of respondents said they strongly supported such a law. For more information on the polling results, click here:

http://www.nationalpartnership.org/epd47.

That new law is the Paycheck Fairness Act, and we need it because it would make it harder for employers to hide pay discrimination, help train women and girls about salary negotiation, support government collection of critical wage data, and reward employers that have good pay practices. Particularly in these tough economic times, Congress needs to help working families by passing laws that help women get the equal pay they earn.

The House already passed the Paycheck Fairness Act with bipartisan support.  It has 40 co-sponsors in the Senate.  Let your Senator know it is time to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act now!

Sharyn Tejani, Senior Policy Counsel

My mother has worked full-time in New York for most of her life. New data from the Center for American Progress shows that because of the wage gap between men and women, my mom lost out on $312,000 over her working life.

But my mom’s loss is on the low end. Nationwide, the lifetime wage gap costs women $431,000. For my cousins in Washington State, the number is $524,000; for my sister in Boston, it is $475,000.

Check the data and your state here.

In six out of ten families, a mother is the primary or co-breadwinner, so the wage gap can make a huge difference in a family’s economic security. To see how many families in your state rely on a mother’s income and how much more women in your state could afford without the wage gap, look here.

One important step we can take in solving this problem is to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. The Act will modernize our equal pay laws so that it will be harder for employers to get away with pay discrimination, and it will protect workers from employer retaliation if they talk about their own salaries at work.

And here is another great thing the Paycheck Fairness Act will do: It will authorize the federal government to collect wage data from employers. That requirement and data will make a huge difference for women. Last week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that the women suing Wal-Mart could go ahead with their sex discrimination lawsuit that alleges that Wal-Mart failed to promote or pay women fairly. If the claims these women have made are correct, the largest private employer in the country has been shortchanging its women employees for years.

Imagine how much sooner wage discrimination would be solved if employers had to report their salary scales to the government. Right-thinking employers would see differences in the reports, analyze the problem, and fix their wages if the differences were due to discrimination. And wrong-thinking employers could be targeted by the civil rights enforcement agencies.

The Paycheck Fairness Act has passed the House and has 39 cosponsors in the Senate. We need a vote on this critical legislation now.

Contact your Senators and tell them you support the Paycheck Fairness Act—because I really can’t afford a $312,000 Mother’s Day gift.

Sharyn Tejani, Senior Policy Counsel

Eight months of groceries.  That is what the wage gap is costing women and their families.  Don’t believe it? Do the math.

According to data just released from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, the weekly gap in earnings between men and women is $162 which translates into $8,424 per year.  The USDA estimates that a family of four that spends “liberally” on its groceries spends $264.10 per week.  Put those two together, and you have 32 weeks—eight months worth of groceries—that women and their families miss out on because of the gender wage gap.  Of course, if you use the “thrifty” family weekly grocery bill ($133.40), the number of weeks of groceries is even higher: more than a year’s worth.

What can be done? We can pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. It provides a comprehensive approach to stopping wage discrimination.

Among its many badly needed provisions, the Paycheck Fairness Act will give women information about pay discrimination.  Right now, many employers forbid their workers from talking about their wages.  This secrecy around wages works to the employer’s advantage.  If workers don’t know how much the person sitting next to them is being paid, they can’t uncover wage discrimination.  But with the Paycheck Fairness Act in place, workers would be able to talk about their salaries and learn their coworkers’ salaries without fearing employer retaliation.

In addition to giving us the tools to unearth wage discrimination, the Paycheck Fairness Act would modernize equal pay laws so that victims of gender wage discrimination are able to get the same types of damages that are available under civil rights statutes that protect against discrimination on the basis of race or national origin.

The House has already passed the Paycheck Fairness Act, and yesterday the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee held a hearing on equal pay that focused on the bill.  We need a vote by the full Senate soon. So let your Senator know that you support the Paycheck Fairness Act—and then start making your grocery list.

Sharyn Tejani, Senior Policy Counsel

This week we celebrate the one-year anniversary of enactment of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act: a law that righted a terrible Supreme Court decision and set the stage for the next fair pay law we need — the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Lilly Ledbetter’s story is an inspiration.  Almost 20 years after starting work as one of just a few women at a tire plant, she received an anonymous note letting her know that she was being paid less than her male coworkers — even those who had worked there less time than she had.  She sued and a jury ruled in her favor, but the Supreme Court reversed the ruling.  Lilly continued fighting and she won where it matters most — in the court of public opinion and with Congress.  Read more about the case and the law here.

But even after Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and President Obama made it the first bill he signed into law, wage discrimination persists.  Women still are paid just 77 cents to a man’s dollar and the inequities remain, even when education and type of job are factored out. For some alarming statistics on the extent of the wage gap, click here.  So, as Lilly Ledbetter said on the day that her bill was signed, now we need to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. 

The Paycheck Fairness Act will help stop wage discrimination in four important ways:

1. Making it harder for employers to justify wage discrimination;
2. Prohibiting retaliation against workers who ask about employers’ wage practices or disclose their own wages;
3. Authorizing the government to collect wage data so civil rights enforcement agencies can target their resources; nad
4. Offering employers technical assistance to help them analyze their pay data and make sure they are not discriminating.

Learn more about the Paycheck Fairness Act here.

The House of Representatives has already passed the Paycheck Fairness Act, and it has 35 cosponsors in the Senate.  Click here to let Senators know that you support equal wages for women and the Paycheck Fairness Act. 

Let’s honor Lilly Ledbetter and give ourselves something else to celebrate. Take action today!

Sharyn Tejani

Every day, women’s rights and civil rights groups work to improve the laws that govern our lives. And several times each day, workers sign away their right to enforce those laws in court.

Workers, of course, have no choice — if they don’t sign, they won’t get the job or risk losing their job.

Despite this blatant imbalance of power, courts routinely enforce what workers sign, and workers who are sexually harassed, fired for their race, or refused a reasonable accommodation for their disability find out too late that they can’t go to court to vindicate their rights. Instead, they have to go through a secret arbitration process where the person making the decision relies on the fact that employers hire them to hear these types of cases, the federal rules of evidence may not apply, damages that are in the statute don’t have to be given, and any decision is kept secret.

But some workers have the courage to take this system public — and hopefully you have already heard the story of one of them: Jamie Leigh Jones.

In 2005, Jones, a former employee of Halliburton/KBR, was viciously assaulted, gang raped, and sexually harassed by co-workers while working for Halliburton in Iraq. After she reported the attack, Halliburton locked up Ms. Jones in a shipping container with an armed guard out front. She was only able to contact her family after convincing her guard to lend her his cell phone.

Her dad got in touch with a Republican Congressman who got her help. Upon her rescue from Iraq and her return to the States, Ms. Jones filed a lawsuit against Halliburton for the appalling harm she endured. Halliburton insisted that Ms. Jones submit her claims to forced arbitration, because when she started working for them, she had signed an agreement to not bring claims against the company in court.

Four years after the attack, the Fifth Circuit ruled that Ms. Jones’ sexual assault claims could proceed to court, but that her sexual harassment claims could be forced into arbitration. So only now, four years later, a court will hear part of Ms. Jones’ case. Here is the testimony she gave in front of a Senate committee this month.

Ms. Jones’ case has become well known thanks to her willingness to go public — and thanks to Senator Al Franken, who is working to make sure that the Department of Defense does not spend our tax payer dollars to support companies that make their workers sign this type of agreement. See him talking about the Amendment he introduced to stop this here.

Sixty-eight Senators — including all the Republican women — voted for it. (See how your Senator voted.)

Now we’re working to make sure that the Franken Amendment survives the negotiations between the House and the Senate as this legislation is reconciled, and that efforts to weaken it fail.

How can you help? Call your Representative and Senators at 202/224-3121 and tell them you support the Franken Amendment to the DOD Spending Bill because you want your tax money spent with companies that treat workers fairly. And educate yourself about the dangers of mandatory arbitration here.

Sharyn Tejani

It is official. Women are still getting short-changed when it comes to our wages. Last week, the government released information on pay and gender.

Even in 2009, we are not receiving equal pay for equal work.

A woman working full time is still paid only 77 cents to a man’s dollar in this country. So a woman has to work all of 2009 and into April 2010 to be paid as much as a man was paid in 2009 for equal work.

Alarmingly, we saw virtually no improvement this year. The wage gap is about the same as last year. The rate of progress is glacial; at the rate of improvement we were seeing before this stagnation, equal pay would come sometime in 2058 – and now the “progress” has slowed down!

The lack of any improvement in closing the wage gap is especially frightening given data showing how badly women need equal pay. The economic downturn has caused enormous job losses, especially among men—meaning that more and more families are solely dependent on the income women are bringing in. When women are not paid fairly, families suffer.

The new data also show that as poverty rates are increasing, women on their own—single women, divorced women, widows—are experiencing very high rates of poverty. Women of color in that group are even worse off. Again, the lack of equal pay has devastating effects for these women and for the families they support.

What keeps the pay gap going? Study after study that controls for factors that go into wages—education, experience, occupation—fails to explain it. The only conclusion possible is that equally qualified men and women are being paid different wages for the same work. In other words, discrimination persists.

And unequal pay begets more inequality. Salaries at a new job often reflect past salaries; retirement benefits are a percentage of salary, as are Social Security payments. So a woman who is being paid less now because of discrimination will probably be paid less at her next job and she will certainly be paid less when she retires.

Most employers have policies that prohibit workers from talking about their wages, which keeps women in the dark about these inequities. To fix these problems, we need the Senate do what the House has done—pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. This new law will make it harder for employers to defend unequal pay decisions, given victims of unequal pay more remedies, and help stop employers from retaliating against workers who share salary information.

Or we can just wait for April 2058.