Paycheck Fairness Act

Floor Speech

Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I am here this morning on a very serious and important subject--the Paycheck Fairness Act. I thank my colleagues who were with me earlier today at an event we attended. The President is doing an event right now. He has announced he will require all Federal contractors to follow the rule that there should be no retaliation against people in the workplace who share information about their pay. It sounds like a basic principle of fairness but, unfortunately, the law has gaps that permit discrimination--gender discrimination, unequal pay for the same work. So today on Equal Pay Day, I am here to advocate for the Paycheck Fairness Act, which will help fill some of those gaps.

This issue is not a man's issue, it is not a woman's issue. It is a family issue. It is not about women, it is about paycheck fairness. So it is as much about men as it is about women. Right now 40 percent of all our families are supported by women either as the sole or primary breadwinner. That means the children in those families, and the men, depend on that income and on the fairness of their paychecks to keep a roof over their head and to keep food on the table.

Paycheck fairness is about a fair shot--a fair shot for every woman and
every person in American society. It is part of a larger agenda which includes raising the minimum wage, which we still have to do, and restoring unemployment insurance, which the Senate did yesterday but we still have to do in the House. That larger agenda about a fair shot goes to the core of the American conscience about what is right, but it also happens to be what is economically smart. Paying women equal to men for the same work means that women will come to jobs and they will work better in those jobs, more productively. Women have so much to contribute in jobs where they serve equally or better than men.

Unfortunately, the promise of the Equal Pay Act, signed in 1963 by President Kennedy, has yet to be achieved. That promise was that equality would prevail in the workplace. Yet 51 years later the disparities are glaring, the gaps between gender pay are unacceptable and inexcusable. Women make only 77 percent of every dollar earned by men. The disparity is even greater in certain professions. In the janitorial profession, among supervisors, and among CEOs, women make 70 cents or less on the dollar. The same is true among financial advisers and among product inspectors. So the disparities cut across all professions. In fact, in 97 percent of all professions, women make less on average than men. That is why we must work to change the law.

The Paycheck Fairness Act would accomplish a number of very simple straightforward goals. No. 1, it would enable workers to share information without fear of retaliation. Right now, a worker can be fired or demoted if he or she shares information about what they are making. The Lilly Ledbetter Act of 2009 advanced these goals and made some progress, but this threat of retaliation is real and completely unconscionable and it should be directly prohibited by law.

Second, the burden should be on the employer to establish that pay disparities are business related or job specific. Those disparities ought to be the job of the employer to justify, not the employee. After all, it is not the employee who makes those decisions, it is the employer. So the employer ought to be the one to present a justification based on objective and real business-related or job-specific factors.

Finally, the Paycheck Fairness Act provides for punitive damages. Only by establishing punitive damages can the evil and harm done by pay discrimination be effectively deterred. The economic penalty will discourage employers by providing real consequences for their discrimination.

This issue is really an American issue that has resonance coast to coast, job to job, and person to person, but mostly it has resonance among families. The estimates are that eliminating the gender pay gap will reduce poverty among families headed by single working mothers from 28.7 percent to 15 percent. It will reduce poverty, most importantly, among children. It will give those children a leg up that they lack now. It will give their moms a sense of justified dignity and self-respect. It will make a practical difference in the lives of families, raising the self-respect and dignity of men as well as women. If they are the beneficiaries of false factors, simple gender discrimination, how can they justify the additional pay that they as men make?

Discovering and proving discrimination is a formidable, daunting, sometimes insurmountable challenge. Discovering it is difficult enough. That is why sharing of information is necessary. Proving it is sometimes virtually impossible without the kind of law the Paycheck Fairness Act will provide, the rights and making those rights real that can be achieved, ending systemic pay discrimination that undermines and disserves our entire society. It demeans all of us. It fails to give people a fair shot when that is the ethos, the core conscience of American economic profit. A fair shot is not only fair, it is smart. It will promote jobs and economic growth, which all of us deeply want and deserve.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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