Archive for the 'Workplace Fairness' Category

Celebrating Ledbetter: End Pay Discrimination Against Women Now!

Published on January 25, 2010 in Sharyn Tejani and Workplace Fairness. 0 Comments
Sharyn Tejani, Senior Policy Counsel

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!

Pregnancy Discrimination On Wisteria Lane!

Published on January 2, 2010 in Kesia Brown, Work & Family and Workplace Fairness. 0 Comments
Desperate Housewives

Desperate Housewives

If you haven’t seen the latest episodes of Desperate Housewives, you have missed more than just the usual melodrama swirling around the residents of Wisteria Lane. A new storyline may be all-too-familiar to many viewers — a woman facing pregnancy discrimination on the job.

Lynnette, a working wife, mother of four, and “desperate housewife” chose not to reveal her pregnancy to Carlos, her boss and longtime friend and neighbor. When Lynnette received a promotion over a coworker who was pregnant, it became clear to her that she would be discriminated against as well if Carlos found out about her pregnancy.

Her fears were confirmed in a recent episode. Once Carlos discovered that Lynnette was pregnant, she was quickly fired. Although Carlos claimed that she was fired because she refused to take a promotion and relocate, it was clear to her — and to the audience — that the real reason was her pregnancy. Can this happen in real life, or is it just another outlandish plot?

Statistics show that the Desperate Housewives pregnancy discrimination storyline is neither exaggerated nor rare. In 2008, pregnancy discrimination charges rose to their highest level in the history of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which saw an almost 13 percent increase in claims over the previous year. And the most recent increase is part of a trend; since 1992, pregnancy discrimination charges to the EEOC and its companion agencies have skyrocketed by 86 percent. Read about the increase here.

Some cases rival the drama on Wisteria Lane. In 2004, the Department of Justice joined a lawsuit against the Washington D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department, claiming that women in training for the program were required to take pregnancy tests and told that they could lose their jobs if they became pregnant. As a result, two women said they chose to terminate their pregnancies for fear of losing their jobs. The complaint the U.S. Department of Justice filed against the employer is here. The case was eventually settled and the women received $100,000 each.

In 2007, the EEOC settled a case of pregnancy discrimination for $350,000 against Mothers Ware Inc., which sells maternity clothes. According to the EEOC, the store refused to hire pregnant women and discriminated against a supervisor who complained about the policy. Read the EEOC’s press release about the case here.

In August, the EEOC brought a pregnancy discrimination suit against a New Jersey trucking company, Decker Transport. According to the EEOC, when one of the women working at Decker informed her boss she was pregnant, she was immediately put on leave and told she should not come back until she got “rid of the problem.” When she refused, she was fired.

Those are women who spoke up and complained. Many more may be afraid to do so, or may not even know that discrimination against pregnant women is illegal.
Find out more about your rights here.

Given the economic crisis, it is especially important that women have secure employment. For those outside of Wisteria Lane, pregnancy discrimination truly can create a desperate situation. Not only does it cause emotional suffering, but it also threatens the economic security of working families who rely on women’s income.

Learn more about the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and what protections it provides.

What Did You Just Sign?

Published on October 26, 2009 in Sharyn Tejani and Workplace Fairness. 0 Comments
Sharyn Tejani

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.

No Progress on the Wage Gap…Again!

Published on September 14, 2009 in Sharyn Tejani and Workplace Fairness. 0 Comments
Sharyn Tejani

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.