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MOUNT KISCO, N.Y. — State Senate candidate Justin Wagner (D-Croton-on-Hudson) is seeking to make the gender wage gap a factor this election season - a women’s issue that is still in play despite the passage of 1963’s federal Equal Pay Act.
The politician, who is running against Senator Greg Ball (R-Patterson) for the 40th Senate District seat in November, hosted a roundtable discussion on equal pay for women that was held Wednesday morning at the Mount Kisco Public Library.
According to Wagner, the New York State Fair Pay Act has been repeatedly passed by the State Assembly with support from Assemblywoman Sandy Galef (D-Ossining), who was present at the talk along with Congresswoman Nita Lowey (D-Harrison), and National Organization for Women (NOW) co-founder Muriel Fox. However, the state Senate has not yet allowed a vote on the bill, he said.
The act would prohibit employers from discrimination against employees on the basis of gender, race or national origin regarding pay for equal and comparable work, and make it illegal for employers to retaliate against employees who openly discuss their salaries or benefits in the workplace.
Lowey said that the fact that women in New York earn 82 cents on the dollar, while nationally, women earn 77 cents on the dollar, results in lost wages for families that could go toward retirement, a college fund, or a down payment on a home.
Lowey said, “Yesterday, Mitt Romney expressed disdain for working poor families and low-income seniors, many of which are women who depend on Medicare and Social Security,” which are both based on income.
Wagner said the issue of fair wages was not just moral, but economic. One of the keys to unleashing economic growth, he said, “is to make sure that everyone in the workforce knows that their work will be rewarded and that incentives are there.”
Galef, who is working on passing a bill to increase the state’s minimum wage, said the Assembly needs reasonable allies in the Senate in order to make progress.
“We need partners like Justin in the Senate to get these things to become law,” she said.
According to Wagner’s campaign literature, Sen. Ball voted “no” on the Equal Pay Act in 2007 and 2008. But a post published on Ball’s website Tuesday stated that the senator introduced a bill in April to establish a policy of equal pay for state civil service employees.
The post also touted Ball’s performance on the issue of domestic violence and other women’s issues and noted that in his four years as a New York Assemblyman, he voted in favor of equal pay five times.
Comments (1)
Nita Lowey ignores reality in favor of ideology.
Forgive the long comment:
Ultimately, the sole driving force behind all "gender equal pay" legislation, including the Ledbetter Act, is the belief that women earn 77 cents to men's dollar in the same jobs.
The figures are arrived at by comparing the sexes' median incomes: women's median is 77 percent of men's. In 2009, the median income of full-time, year-round workers was $47,127 for men, compared to $36,278 for women or 77 percent of men's median. http://tinyurl.com/5pl8or
Median means 50% of workers earn above the figures and 50% below. That means that a lot of female workers in the higher ranges of women's median make more money than a lot of male workers in the lower ranges of men's median.
The advocates' interpretation of “women's 77 cents to men's dollar" doesn't account for the number of hours worked each week, experience, seniority, training, education or even the job description itself. It compares all women to all men, not people in the same job with the same experience. So the salary of a 60-year-old male computer engineer with 30 years at his company is weighed against that of a young first-year female teacher. Also, men are much more likely than women to work two jobs; hence, more often than women, a man earning, say, $50,000 from his two jobs is weighed against a women earning $25,000 from her one job, so that he appears to be unfairly earning twice as much as she.
Thus, contrary to what pay-equity advocates say, women's 77 cents to men's dollar does NOT mean women are paid less than men in the same jobs. Nor does it mean, even more incredibly in the vein of “men are stronger than women” (which means to many that every man is stronger than every woman), that every woman earns 23% less than every man, perhaps leading some of the more benighted and the blinkered ideological to believe Diane Sawyer of ABC News earns less than the young man walking back and forth on the street wearing a “Pizzas $5” sign.
Over the decades, strategically ignoring the true meaning of "women's 77 cents to men's dollar" has been less than productive:
No law yet has closed the gender wage gap — not the 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, not Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, not affirmative action (which has benefited mostly white women, the group most vocal about the wage gap - http://tinyurl.com/74cooen), not the 1991 amendments to Title VII, not the 1991 Glass Ceiling Commission created by the Civil Rights Act, not the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act not diversity, not the countless state and local laws and regulations, not the horde of overseers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and not the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.... Nor will a "paycheck fairness" law work.
That's because women's pay-equity advocates, who always insist one more law is needed, continue to overlook the effects of female AND male behavior:
Despite the 40-year-old demand for women's equal pay, millions of wives still choose to have no pay at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of "The Secrets of Happily Married Women," stay-at-home wives, including the childless who represent an estimated 10 percent, constitute a growing niche. "In the past few years,” he says in a CNN report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier....” at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka. If indeed a higher percentage of women is staying at home, perhaps it's because feminists and the media have told women for years that female workers are paid less than men in the same jobs — so why bother working if they're going to be penalized and humiliated for being a woman.)
As full-time mothers or homemakers, stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living in luxury? Answer: Because they're supported by their husband, an “employer” who pays them to stay at home.
The implication of this is probably obvious to 10-year-olds but seems incomprehensible to or is ignored by feminists and the liberal media: If millions of wives are able to accept NO wages, millions of other wives, whose husbands' incomes vary, are able to:
-accept low wages
-refuse overtime and promotions
-choose jobs based on interest first, wages second — the reverse of what men tend to do
-take more unpaid days off
-avoid uncomfortable wage-bargaining (http://tinyurl.com/3a5nlay)
-work part-time instead of full-time (“In 2011, 22% of male physicians and 44% of female physicians worked less than full time, up from 7% of men and 29% of women from Cejka’s 2005 survey.” http://tinyurl.com/7la747z)
Each of these job choices lowers women's median pay relative to men's.
Women are able to make these choices because they are supported — or, if unmarried, anticipate being supported — by a husband who must earn more than if he'd chosen never to marry. (Still, even many men who shun marriage, unlike their female counterparts, feel their self worth is tied to their net worth.) This is how MEN help create the wage gap: as a group they tend more than women to pass up jobs that interest them for ones that pay well.
So we can stop blaming the income gap on women's job choices and start blaming the choices of both sexes. Which means blaming no one. Which means ending the "equal pay" legislation that acts to lower wages for both male workers and female workers and to create higher prices for customers.
Points to ponder:
If the roles were reversed so that men raised the children and women raised the income, men would average lower pay than women.
Why would "greedy, profit-obsessed" employers, many of whom where possible hire illegal immigrants for their cheap labor, pay men more than women for the same work? If employers could get away with that, they would not hire one man, ever.
The power in money is not in earning it (there is only responsibility, sweat, and stress in earning money). The power in money is in SPENDING it. And, Warren Farrell says in “The Myth of Male Power,” "Women control consumer spending by a wide margin in virtually every consumer category." Women (white women) also control most of the wealth. See http://www.she-conomy.com/facts-on-women (Women's control over spending, adds Farrell, gives women control over TV programs.)
Much more in "Will the Ledbetter Act Help Women?" at http://tinyurl.com/blge6fm