National Equal Pay Day
Floor Speech
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Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, I wish to say a special thank-you to Senator Mikulski for her terrific leadership on all of this.
Today is Equal Pay Day. By the sound of it, one would think it is some sort of historic holiday commemorating the anniversary of a landmark day that our country guaranteed equal pay for women, but that is not what it is about--not even close--because in the year 2016, at a time when we have self-driving cars and computers that fit on our wrists, women still make only 79 cents for every $1 a man makes, and we are still standing in the U.S. Congress debating whether a woman should get fired for asking what the guy down the hall makes for doing exactly the same job.
So why do we recognize April 12 as Equal Pay Day? It took the average woman working from January 1 of last year until today to make as much as the average man made in 2015. That means she had to work an extra 3\1/2\ months in order to make what a man made last year, and that means, once again, she starts the year in a hole.
Equal Pay Day isn't a national day of celebration. It is a national day of embarrassment.
We hear a lot about how the economy is improving, and there is good news to point to. Unemployment is under 5 percent, GDP continues to rise, the stock market is up, but too many families across the country feel like the game is rigged against them. They work hard, they play by the rules, and they still struggle to make ends meet. Here is the thing: They are right. The game is rigged against working families, and pay discrimination is part of that.
For women, it has been a one-two punch in the gut. For decades, wages have flattened out for American workers, and for women the wage gap just compounds that problem. If we closed both the productivity wage gap and the gender wage gap from 1979 to 2014, women's median hourly wages would be 70 percent higher today.
Even though we have solid data, the Republicans in Washington refuse to act. Heck, they would rather spend their time trying to defund Planned Parenthood health clinics and cut women's access to birth control than do anything--anything at all--to give working women a raise.
So, yes, the game is rigged when women earn less than men for doing the same work. It is rigged when women can be fired for asking how much the guy down the hall makes for doing the same job. It is rigged when women have to choose between healthy pregnancies and getting their paychecks. It is rigged when women can get fired just for requesting a regular work schedule to go back to school or get a second job. It is rigged when women earn less their whole lives so that their Social Security checks are smaller and their student loans are bigger. The game is rigged against women and families, and it has to stop.
I am standing with my colleagues today. I am standing with women and friends of women all over the country to demand equal pay for equal work. It is 2016--not 1916--and it is long past time to eliminate gender discrimination in the workforce. This is about economics, but it is also about our values. It is about who we are as a people and what kind of country we are trying to build for both our sons and our daughters.
Today, we recognize Equal Pay Day, and we fight today because we don't want to have to recognize it year after year after year in the future.
I thank the Presiding Officer and yield the floor.
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