Two years ago, Democrats brought the Paycheck Fairness Act to the Senate floor, and thought they had a credible shot at passing the bill. Ultimately, 58 senators supported it and 41 opposed it -- which, thanks to the way the modern Senate operates, means the bill failed. (The chamber's GOP "moderates" -- Scott Brown, Susan Collins, and Olympia Snowe -- all joined the filibuster that killed the bill.
This year, Democrats are giving it another try, with a vote slated for next week.
Given the larger context, and the Republicans' "war on women" in 2012, is there any chance the proposal might get the supermajority needed to overcome GOP obstructionism? It's a long shot, though the legislation clearly makes Republicans, including their ostensible leader, nervous.
Business groups are opposed to the new legislation, saying it would create a legal morass -- but Mr. Romney, the GOP's presumptive presidential nominee, has been silent.
His campaign didn't respond to five messages left over the past week seeking his stance on the Paycheck Fairness Act.
Keep in mind, the Washington Times is a conservative paper -- roughly the print equivalent of Fox News -- that can usually get its calls returned by Republican candidates.
But Romney, who also refused to state a firm opinion on the Violence Against Women Act, is suddenly shy once more. If he sides with Democrats in support of the measure, Romney undercuts his allies on Capitol Hill, as well as friends at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is lobbying to kill the bill. If he sticks with this party, Romney risks exacerbating the already-large gender gap, taking yet another position that's hostile towards women's interests.
So he refuses to respond to the Washington Times' phone calls.
For those unfamiliar with the substance behind the legislation, the bill would "enhance the remedies available for victims of gender-based discrimination and require employers to show that wage differences are job-related, not sex-based, and driven by business necessity. The measure would also protect employees from retaliation for sharing salary information, which is important for deterring and challenging discriminatory compensation.
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was an important step forward when it comes to combating discrimination, but it was also narrowly focused to address a specific problem: giving victims of discrimination access to the courts for legal redress. The Paycheck Fairness Act is a broader measure.
President Obama is a strong supporter of the legislation.
With women still only making 77 cents for every dollar men earn in similar jobs, the question may soon become why the Republican presidential candidate seems indifferent to the problem.
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It would appear that Willard is a fan of mark Twain.
Better to be thought a fool , than open your mouth and remove all doubt.
It would also appear that Willard intends to do most of his media appearances from the safety of the Faux Nooze bubble or equally compliant MSM anchors who only lob softballs
No Willard on MSNBC Guaranteed
Steve, don't you get it - the GOP doesn't support the bill because they want women out of the workforce being forced to have those babies. It's their "Leave It to Beaver" moment, when "real women" stay home and have babies, cook and clean - while men go out and "earn the paychecks"!
Never mind that in the real world it actually takes two salaries to keep afloat, and let's not add "children" into the mix. Then again, the dumbed down sheeple will "blame other" for all of the ills they feel they suffer....
All i can and need to say about Romney being silent is Chicken-@!$%#
Progressives everywhere need only say bluntly that Mitt is against it. In the binary black/white world of the GOP, unless you are for it, you are against it. Should the Mitt say he never said he was for/against it, simply change to narrative to say Mitt is not only against the bill, like almost everything else, Mitt is too terrified of his own shadow to take a firm stand on ANYTHING!
... this week.
If Scott Walker got rid of Wisconsin's version of the Fair Pay Act and he's polling at 50%, then does that mean 50% of women in Wisconsin don't care if they're being paid less to do the same work (despite paying more for health insurance)?
I don't understand it either, but that seems to be the case. Maybe all that cheese clogs the "equality" synapse.
I don't think the word Fair, Fairness, or Fair Share, has passed through Willard's lips during this entire campaign, nor will it ever.
Well, to be fair (har har), there isn't a normative definition of what's "fair" that we could point to. But, even given that. Romney's ideology doesn't allow for what liberals/leftists consider to be fair.
It's a feature, not a bug, that we all define our terms. Hell, President Obama was able to use that feature to his great advantage (I'm a leftist, but let's not pretend that "Hope and Change" were, themselves, concrete ideals). What we have to hope for is that the majority of American voters can see that Mitt Romney doesn't represent them and doesn't even want to represent them.
Rather than put his foot in his mouth again, Mitt has chosen to keep his head in his ass.
Rachel: As you know, many pro-life Democrats were cosponsors of the Paycheck Fairness Act of 2009. (Sadly it died in the Senate) and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay act. Here is a list of pro-life Democrats in the House of Representatives who were cosponsors of the Paycheck Fairness Act of 2009 and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. It is shameful that these fierce supporters of equal pay for women were smeared as if they were Republicans.
Note! My website is VERY slow to update,. Currently I have listed the pro-life democrats who cosponsored the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. When my site finally saves an update, it will include the pro-life Democrats in the House who cosponsored BOTH the Lilly LedBetter Fair Pay Act. and the Equal Pay Act of 2009. It is the same list, except John Barrow of Georgia did not cosponsor the Equal Pay act of 2009. He did, however, vote for it and spoke in praise of it.
Here is the link to my site:
http://johnmssite.com/
Asking Romney to make an independent decision or take an independent stance. Fat chance. There is a reason the GOP wasn't thrilled with this candidate. Leadership is lacking. The GOP isn't always 100% in agreement and they might have to rely on Romney making a decision. His resume and campaign behavior should have them concerned.
Re: "women still only making 77 cents for every dollar men earn in similar jobs"
Why "similar jobs"? Everyone else says "the same jobs."
Here's a different take:
“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 that, even more incredibly in the vein of “men are stronger than women” (which means to many that every man is stronger than every woman), 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.
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.
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.
“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 $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.
Strategically ignoring this over the decades 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 the 1991 amendments to Title VII, not affirmative action (which has benefited mostly white women, the group most vocal about the wage gap - http://tinyurl.com/74cooen), 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? 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 range from moderate to high, 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 (“According to a 2009 UK study for the Centre for Policy Studies, only 12 percent of the 4,690 women surveyed wanted to work full time”: http://bit.ly/ihc0tl See also an Australian report at http://tinyurl.com/862kzes)
All of which LOWER WOMEN'S AVERAGE AND MEDIAN PAY.
Women are able to make these choices because they are supported — or 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 pass up jobs that interest them for ones that pay well. If the roles were reversed so that men raised the children and women raised the income, men would average lower pay than women.
Points to ponder:
Why would "greedy, profit-obsessed" employers, many of whom hire cheap illegal aliens to keep labor costs down, 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” at http://www.warrenfarrell.org/TheBook/index.html, "Women control consumer spending by a wide margin in virtually every consumer category." (Women's control over spending, adds Farrell, gives women control over TV programs.)
“There were fewer cases charging sex-based wage discrimination last year than the year before the [Ledbetter law] was signed, and the wage gap was wider in 2010 than it was in 2007.... The bottom line: In Obama’s first three years in office, the EEOC filed six gender-based wage discrimination lawsuits — down from 18 during Bush’s second term." -BusinessWeek, May 13, 2012, at http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-17/to-lure-womens-votes-obama-turns-to-lilly-ledbetter” and at http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-05-13/obama-pitches-equal-pay-to-win-women-even-as-charges-drop
Excerpted from "Will the Ledbetter Act Help Women?" at http://malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/will-the-ledbetter-fair-pay-act-help-women/
Except for the minor detail that the whole Ledbetter act was based on a woman who "wonder of wonders " was payed less than a man for doing the same work.
There have been class action suits against employers such as Walmart and Publix who did not promote women and in effect denied them equal opportunity .
As for the fair pay act ....I guess if you pay the same to a woman and a man and promote in a non discriminatory manner you have nothing to worry about .
Regarding "class action suits against employers such as Walmart," I recommend:
"Taking Apart the Walmart Sex-base Class-action Lawsuit"
http://malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/taking-apart-the-walmart-sex-bias-class-action-lawsuit/
Lot of time on your hands don't you?
It's still clear what this bill accomplishes, other than pander to a particular voting bloc. It still allows exceptions for seniority, merit based, etc. Other than allow idle chatter and possibility expose employers to endless legal fees, what has it accomplished?
Pandering to a particular voting block...Really! Which voting block would that be?
Women. Older workers. People with Disabilities. People of Color. Is that the voting block you are referencing?
Folks, most of this is crazy. Women without children make more than men do. Fact. Women with children have either chosen not to work (if they have the luxury of a highly-paid husband) or work in professions that are less dangerous (i.e. [Latin.....id est]) than men'sprofessions, thus the lower pay. End of story.
Really?? I was a police officer and got paid less even though i had 2 college degrees. Oh and i am a blackbelt. It wasnt that i couldnt do the job. It was that i did it 2 well!!! Even with that i was paid substantially less!! Try another arguement for paying women less than men for doing the same job!!!
people go along with all this because they think it will never affect them but when it does they are going to blame everyone else
People should get to determine their own pay because this is America.
http://tinyurl.com/PayCheckFairnessAct2012