Passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act is a Moral Imperative
By Lexie Kuznick
On Wednesday, July 11, 2007, the Workforce Protections Subcommittee of the House Committee on Education and Labor held a hearing on the Paycheck Fairness Act (H.R. 1338). Congressional attention to this bill comes at a critical juncture in employment discrimination law, as the Supreme Court has recently further entrenched sex discrimination and unequal pay in its Ledbetter v. Goodyear decision. Our own Marcia Greenberger testified at Wednesday’s hearing, emphasizing to the Committee that the Paycheck Fairness Act would address basic inadequacies in the current Equal Pay Act and reaffirm Congress’s commitment to realizing gender equity within the workplace in the wake of recent setbacks.
Nearly 45 years after the Equal Pay Act was signed into law, equal pay for men and women is still not a reality. Although it’s true that progress has been made (in 1963 women earned only 59 cents for every dollar earned by men) today women working full-time year-round still earn only about 77 cents for every dollar earned by men –hardly a cause for celebration.
The Equal Pay Act has failed to adequately erase the pay gap for many reasons and the Paycheck Fairness Act would addresses the many substantive and procedural defects in the law that undermine its effectiveness. Among many other important provisions, the Act would take the important step of allowing plaintiffs to recover compensatory and punitive damages. Currently, women who prove their employers violated the Equal Pay Act are left with only restricted awards, depriving them of full relief. And these limited remedies have only a limited deterrent effect on employers. Time and again, large corporations are ordered to pay only minimal damages, amounting to hardly a slap on the wrist. Indeed, for some employers discrimination has become a basic cost of doing business. Moreover, the change will put gender-based wage discrimination on an equal footing with wage discrimination based on race or ethnicity, for which full compensatory and punitive damages are already available.
With 224 co-sponsors in the House, support for the Paycheck Fairness Act is strong. And resistance by the bill’s opponents is astounding – as Representative Payne suggested at the hearing Wednesday, Congress has a moral imperative to adequately address the unacceptable wage disparity that plagues American workplaces. The passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act would be one important step in the right direction, and, coupled with the critical legislative fix to the Ledbetter decision that we discussed here before (the Committee on Education and Labor voted the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act out of committee two weeks ago) and the passage of the Fair Pay Act, gender equality in the workplace may someday (finally) become a reality.
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