Travis Waldron of Think Progress comments on Gov. Scott Walker’s latest decision that will jeopardize the interests of wage discrimination victims.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) quietly repealed his state’s equal pay law last week, a decision that will make it harder for victims of wage discrimination to sue for lost earnings and back wages. The law was enacted primarily to address the massive pay gap that exists between male and female workers, which is even bigger in Wisconsin than in other states.

Repealing the law was a no-brainer for state Sen. Glenn Grothman (R), who led the effort because of his belief that pay discrimination is a myth driven by liberal women’s groups. Ignoring multiple studies showing that the pay gap exists, Grothman blamed females for prioritizing childrearing and homemaking instead of money, saying, “Money is more important for men,” The Daily Beast reports:

Whatever gaps exist, he insists, stem from women’s decision to prioritize childrearing over their careers. “Take a hypothetical husband and wife who are both lawyers,” he says. “But the husband is working 50 or 60 hours a week, going all out, making 200 grand a year. The woman takes time off, raises kids, is not go go go. Now they’re 50 years old. The husband is making 200 grand a year, the woman is making 40 grand a year. It wasn’t discrimination. There was a different sense of urgency in each person.” [...]
Grothman doesn’t accept these studies. When I ran the numbers by him, he replied, “The American Association of University Women is a pretty liberal group.” Nor, he argued, does its conclusion take into account other factors, like “goals in life. You could argue that money is more important for men. I think a guy in their first job, maybe because they expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious. To attribute everything to a so-called bias in the workplace is just not true.”

Among Grothman’s inaccuracies is the idea that only males “expect to be a breadwinner someday.” In two-thirds of American families, women are either primary or co-breadwinners, and yet they still earn less than their male counterparts in all 50 states.

In 2011, the Wisconsin GOP carried out an extensive war on workers that led to recall efforts for state representatives, senators, and Walker himself. In 2012, Grothman and his colleagues have expanded that war to one on women, meaning a group of workers that was already struggling to keep pace with their male counterparts is only going to fall further behind.

The great USA we all know and love was built after World War II, as we grew away into prosperity, aided by strong democratic labor unions that spawned the steady growth of the middle class, which drove the economic engine of all things American. Today, unions are on life support, and our American middle class way of life is dying, as our manufacturing and labor force is outsourced to Asia for shareholder profit. We stand together or we fall alone. Occupy something in your life today.

Richard D. Kahlenberg and Moshe Z. Marvit for New York Times –
FROM the 1940s to the 1970s, organized labor helped build a middle-class democracy in the United States. The postwar period was as successful as it was because of unions, which helped enact progressive social legislation from the Civil Rights Act to Medicare. Since then, union representation of American workers has fallen, in tandem with the percentage of income going to the middle class. Broadly shared prosperity has been replaced by winner-take-all plutocracy.

Corporations will tell you that the American labor movement has declined so significantly — to around 7 percent of the private-sector work force today, from 35 percent of the private sector in the mid-1950s — because unions are obsolete in a global economy, where American workers have to compete against low-wage nonunion workers in other countries. But many vibrant industrial democracies, including Germany, have strong unions despite facing the same pressures from globalization.

Other skeptics suggest that because laws now exist providing for worker safety and overtime pay, American employees no longer feel the need to join unions. But polling has shown that a majority of nonunion workers would like to join a union if they could.

In fact, the greatest impediment to unions is weak and anachronistic labor laws. It’s time to add the right to organize a labor union, without employer discrimination, to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, because that right is as fundamental as freedom from discrimination in employment and education. This would enshrine what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed in 1961 at an A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention: “The two most dynamic and cohesive liberal forces in the country are the labor movement and the Negro freedom movement. Together, we can be architects of democracy.”

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that “everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.” The First Amendment has been read to protect freedom of association, and the 1935 National Labor Relations Act recognized the “right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations,” but in reality, the opportunity to organize is a right without a remedy.

Firing someone for trying to organize a union is technically illegal under the 1935 act, but there are powerful incentives for corporations to violate this right, in part because the penalties — mitigated back pay after extended hearings — are so weak.

It is noteworthy that American workers in the airline and railway industries, which are governed not by the 1935 law but by a stronger statute, the Railway Labor Act, have much higher rates of unionization.

Past efforts to strengthen labor laws over four decades have gotten bogged down: Congress cannot pass reforms until labor’s political clout increases, but that won’t happen without labor law reform.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended, has much stronger penalties and procedures than labor laws. Under our proposal, complaints about wrongful terminations for union organizing could still go through the National Labor Relations Board, which has expertise in this field. But the board would employ the procedures currently used by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which provide that after 180 days, a plaintiff can move his or her case from the administrative agency to federal court. There, plaintiffs alleging that they were unfairly dismissed for trying to organize could sue for compensatory and punitive damages and lawyers’ fees, have the opportunity to engage in pretrial legal discovery and have access to a jury — none of which are available under current law.

Our proposal would make disciplining or firing an employee “on the basis of seeking union membership” illegal just as it now is on the basis of race, color, sex, religion and national origin. It would expand the fundamental right of association encapsulated in the First Amendment and apply it to the private workplace just as the rights of equality articulated in the 14th Amendment have been so applied.

The labor and civil rights movements have shared values (advancing human dignity), shared interests (people of color are disproportionately working-class), shared historic enemies (the Jim Crow South was also a bastion of right-to-work laws) and shared tactics (sit-ins, strikes and other forms of nonviolent protest). King, it should be remembered, was gunned down in Memphis in 1968, where he was supporting striking black sanitation workers who marched carrying posters with the message “I Am a Man.” Conceiving of labor organizing as a civil right, moreover, would recast the complexity of labor law reform in clear moral terms.

Some might argue that the Civil Rights Act should be limited to discrimination based on immutable characteristics like race or national origin, not acts of volition. But the act already protects against religious discrimination. Some local civil rights statutes even cover marital status, family responsibilities, matriculation, political affiliation, source of income, or place of residence or business.

Should organizing at work for “mutual aid and protection” not also be covered?

While there are many factors that help explain why the nation has progressed on King’s vision for civil rights while it has moved backward on his goal of economic equality, among the most important is the substantial difference between the strength of our laws on civil rights and labor. It is time to write protections for labor into the Civil Rights Act itself.

For every 95 guys on a construction site, there are five women. Construction work is a boys club.
If you can break through, it’s a living…

Katherine Bowers of WorkingMother.com ponders over the lives of Construction Moms –

She can wrangle a forklift, swing a sledgehammer and drive a nail in three quick blows. Yet when Stephanie Hall, 40, walks onto a new job in her hard hat and Wolverine boots, she’s invariably mistaken for the site secretary. “I say, ‘Nope, I’m your new boss. Guess where you’re starting off today?’” quips the project manager for D.A.G. Construction in Cincinnati and mom of one. Still, she says, “I have to prove myself on every new job. You can see the looks that go, ‘Okay, it’s a woman—can she hack it?’”
Wendy Beaver knows that look and has learned to ignore it, as well as the wolf whistles shot her way. The 40-year-old project engineer for Donahue Favret Contractors is now helping rebuild the downtown New Orleans Hyatt, its blown-out windows an enduring image of Hurricane Katrina’s wrath. Each morning, Wendy drives 30 miles to drop off daughter Hope, 10, at the nearest bus stop. Then she drives 45 miles in the opposite direction to the job site. But once there, she’s often so absorbed by work that she has to force herself to take bathroom breaks. The hotel is her firm’s biggest job yet, a powerful symbol of her hometown’s efforts to rise again: “It feels great to help bring this hotel back to New Orleans.”
A Man’s World?
A full 66 percent of our country’s employment is construction work—and not surprisingly, it’s a boys’ club. For every 95 guys on a construction site, there are five women. Because they’re facing down stereotypes, these women have to keep up. Always. “You carry your own tools; you do everything men do,” says Pat Walker, craft resource and safety manager for Welbro Building Corp. in Maitland, FL, and president of the National Association of Women in Construction Education Foundation. “I hate climbing ladders, but I do it anyway,” says the mom of three adult children.
For Pat, Stephanie, Wendy and other moms, construction is a calling. It’s challenging, it pays well, and, yes, it’s cool. As in, See that? Mommy built that. Stephanie lives for those moments: while working on a new library in her town, she drove 4-year old son Shane by the project weekly so he could watch the structure rise.
Wear Pink? Puh-leaze “It’s my favorite color, but I refuse to wear a pink hard hat,” says Wendy (though the shade can be useful—if a guy borrows her pink tape measure, it’s always returned.) But as Maura Hesdon, 34, Senior Project Manager for Shoemaker Construction in West Conshohocken, PA, asserts, you “don’t need to look butch. I look like a woman on the job. I have very long hair, and I wear earrings. I don’t wear makeup because I’m too lazy, but I would if I felt like it.”
A No-Frills Workplace?Nothing’s cushy on a job site. Lunch? The roach coach. Gotta go? Portapotty’s over there—though this is one place without an endless ladies’ line. where to stash supplies? Your car. A dry shirt, clean socks, water, snacks and ibuprofen. Everyone has a towel, too, Pat says, great for wiping sweat, drying off after a rain shower and draping over the front seat when driving home in dirty work clothes.
And it’s not just conditions that can be rough. Language is salty, tempers flare, people shout. “Men blow up, then they blow it off. They can be screaming and then your best friend ten minutes later,” says Roxanne Rivera, President and CEO of the Associated Builders and Contractors of New Mexico and author of There’s No Crying in Business. She ran her own construction company for decades, learning that “women couch what they say so they don’t hurt feelings, but men are blunt. That doesn’t mean it’s personal.”
Vital to this job are a sense of humor and an ability to dish it out. “When someone calls me ‘honey,’” says Maura, “I say right back, ‘This is my name.’”
A Decent Paycheck?In 2010, even with a continuing building slump, the mean wage for a laborer was $16 per hour (though, as in most fields, men still out earn women). Mastering equipment, rising to supervisor or learning a trade means earning significantly more. “We say, ‘the more you learn, the more you earn,’” says Pat.
And many skills can be picked up on the job. Raises can come as often as every six months, fattening take home by $.75 or $1 more per hour. “It’s a good living,” says Maura, a single mom who owns her own home and is sole breadwinner for her daughters, Madison, 9, and Hannah, 6. “I’m proud of the lessons of independence I’m setting for my girls.”
Yet Maura is quick to admit it’s tricky to balance the not-so-family friendly demands of the job with raising kids. Commutes to work sites are often long, shifts can start pre-dawn (when concrete is typically poured), and you can’t bring your kids to work on construction sites, ever. Problems often need immediate attention: after thieves stole the copper piping off her building, Stephanie spent a chunk of Christmas morning on-site. Still, there is flexibility. Don’t look for it in the employee handbook, but every mom we talked to agreed that once you prove yourself, you’ll be accommodated for family needs. When Wendy was assigned to the Hyatt project and worried about getting Hope to school, her supervisor said, “Don’t change her routine. Just get to the job when you can.”
There’s genuine camaraderie because the focus is more on team achievement—getting the building up on time and under budget—than on pecking order. When something needs to be done, everyone pitches in, from the newbie to the superintendent. Maura is the number three at her company, but when a 200-pound, 40-foot extension ladder needed to be hauled half a mile across a rooftop, her title didn’t matter. A male co-worker grabbed one end, and Maura hefted the other.

Wall Street has been occupied by those representing the 99%. But what about the top 1%? How do they fare? They might be throwing cakes at the hungry masses down below, but how do they share their pies? They might be unleashing atrocities upon the huge majority of people through criminal manipulations, but how fairly do they treat each other?

A look at their annual salaries points to crucial factors of inequality and biases within the top 1% themselves. The masculine, patriarchal and sexist nature of corporate greed duly relegates its women accomplices to the inferior salary brackets. No matter if the women are in the same ranks of CEOs or Presidents, they are just paid way less. In fact, the highest paid woman Safra A. Catz (President, Oracle Corp.) earns less than any of the first 12 highest paid men! And the second highest paid woman Wellington J. Denahan-Norris (COO, Annaly Capital Management) earns less than any of the top 25 highest paid male executives.

The cumulative total earning for the first 9 months of last year was $381,105,205 for the highest paid male executives, while the cumulative total earning for the highest paid female executives for the said period was $118,233,692.

When such disparities in pay across genders have been normalized within the top echelon, it is no wonder the financial bosses of the Wall Street do not think twice about the increasing class society afflicting America today.

Here, then, is the breakdown (first 9-month period, 2010) -

Top 5 Men

Philippe P. Dauman
President and Chief Executive Officer
Viacom, Inc. (VIAB)
2010 Total Compensation: $84,469,515

Mark V. Hurd
President
Oracle Corp. (ORCL)
2010 Total Compensation: $78,362,540

Lawrence J. Ellison
Chief Executive Officer
Oracle Corp. (ORCL)
2010 Total Compensation: $77,556,015

Ray R. Irani
Executive Chairman
Occidental Petroleum Corp. (OXY)
2010 Total Compensation: $76,107,010

Thomas E. Dooley
Chief Operating Officer
Viacom, Inc. (VIAB)
2010 Total Compensation: $64,610,125

Top 5 Women

1. Safra A. Catz
President and Chief Financial Officer
Oracle Corp. (ORCL)
2010 Total Compensation: $42,095,887

2. Wellington J. Denahan-Norris
Vice Chairman, Chief Investment Officer and Chief Operating Officer
Annaly Capital Management, Inc. (NLY)
2010 Total Compensation: $23,634,800

3. Carol Meyrowitz
Chief Executive Officer
TJX Companies, Inc. (TJX)
2010 Total Compensation: $19,252,740

4. Susan M. Ivey
Former Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer
Reynolds American, Inc. (RAI)
2010 Total Compensation: $16,823,900

5. Marina Armstrong
Senior Vice President and General Manager
Gymboree Corp. (GYMB)
2010 Total Compensation: $16,426,365

Sources: Equilar & CNN Money.

Occupy Wall Street and Slut Walk NYC

I’m a feminist because I believe in equality based on gender.
I’m a feminist because I believe that no one has the right to touch you without your consent.
I’m a feminist because I believe that all women should have free and unfettered access to reproductive health care and abortion services.
I’m a feminist because I believe women deserve equal pay for equal work.
I’m a feminist because I believe that women should be able to wear what they want to wear without fear of being assaulted or harassed in the street.
I’m a feminist because I believe that when a woman is sexually harassed or sexually assaulted, we should be asking what the perpetrator was doing or wearing so we can catch him, not what the woman was doing or wearing, so we can blame her for inviting it.
I’m a sex-positive feminist because I believe that sex and sexuality is not the problem, lack of consent is the problem. Clothing is not consent. Consent is consent. The only person responsible for a rape, or for sexual harassment, is the rapist or the sexual harasser.

I’m a feminist because I have faith that once we individually and collectively harness our feminine energy sufficient to offset the pure masculine ethos of the unregulated corporate person, with its unlimited billionaire underwritten speech—we will get back to a relatively lush, safe and sane America where we all share in the beauty of the commons and we all share the costs of maintaining our general welfare.

My name is Jack Tuckner; I’m the co-founder of Tuckner Sipser, a women’s rights/employee rights law firm in NYC, and I want to talk about two significant and related protest gatherings that occurred simultaneously in NYC on October 1, One was SlutWalk NYC, and the other was Occupy Wall Street, but they’re both really protesting the same pathologies afflicting our body politic.

The “Slut Walk” started in Toronto when a cop told a group of female university students to “not dress like sluts in order to avoid being victimized.” This victim-blaming mentality catalyzed a long overdue movement, as sexual violence and sexual harassment are still widespread in our culture and have been for far too long.

In our Rape culture, the rapist/harasser/assaulter fails to control his own impulse to molest, violate, humiliate, harass and/or abuse a female subordinate, for example, or a woman walking down the street, or date who is raped, because he feels little to no empathy, respect or equality between himself and his target object; like Wall Street’s Ayn Randian view of living in perfect selfishness, the rapist is a sociopath, he seeks only his own gratification, and sees his victim as an object, as other, as less than, so her pain, fear, shame, or death is of no consequence to him.

Now take Wall Street culture, part and parcel of Rape culture, only on the Street, the faceless rape “victim” is the poor, the weak, the young, the old, the sick, the middle class; the female, almost all us, really—99% of us, in fact.

In Rape culture, the male cannot or will not reign in his sexual and/or gender- conflicted impulses, so he acts them out on each woman who comes within his destructive path, and in the Wall Street (rape) culture, the boys continue to rape, pillage and plunder Main Street while its enablers victim-blame teachers, cops, fire fighters, factory workers, students, Medicare recipients, immigrants, the EPA; seniors and the unemployed whose benefits are running out–these are the victims that Wall Street blames–the greedy, needy $40,000 per year worker trying to pay her bills, never mind the 2 billion dollar per year hedge fund manager who pays way less percentage of his “earnings” into the common coffer than the rest of us poor folk.

Rape culture and Wall Street culture are symptoms of Male Privilege run amok. No Yin, All Yang. All brain and balls; no heart and no soul.

As women’s rights advocates, we support Occupy Wall Street, as well as drastic changes to our criminal crony corporate culture. Women should not have to face deep cuts to the Women, Infant and Children nutrition program to cut down on low infant birth weights, so that another American company can join the other 18,000 companies incorporated in the same building in the Cayman islands to avoid paying federal taxes to help our country pay its bills. Is that patriotic?

And kids shouldn’t be kicked out of Head Start programs, and young people shouldn’t have to give up their Pell Grants and therefore college, so that the million dollar an hour hedge fund manager who wrecked the economy on purpose can continue to pay a 15% marginal tax rate on his “capital gains” cause he skims other people’s money for a living. And we can’t let these hoods in Congress get away with vilifying, scamming, investigating and destroying Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading sexual and reproductive health care provider, just because they take care of our American girls and women. Shame on those bastards.

Social, economic and gender injustice affects and poisons everything. Look at this bleak landscape we’re living in—and the reason is simple—the billionaires and giant transnational corporations increasingly own and control our commons, and they own the elected leaders through the use of 37,000 highly paid lobbyists in Washington, yet they steadfastly refuse to join us in the fight to keep the jobs in America, to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure by investing in this country they profess to love. Wall Streeters and the politicians they own are stingy, greedy, selfish, small-minded and mean-spirited, and they’re dumb too, as they apparently aspire to living filthy rich in a poor country.

As corporations are now “persons” under the Supreme Court’s grotesque 2010 ruling, yet we still can’t get the Equal Rights Amendment for women passed into law, let’s never forget that first and foremost, we must vigilantly strive to raise the status of women while lowering the status of corporations, if economic, social and gender justice is our goal.

What is most noteworthy is the fact that in the three most respected professional fields – law, medicine and business – women are treated most abysmally. Despite the stringent manners of admissions into professional schools that awards degrees in these coveted areas of expertise, and the accompanying social status that identifies virtues of honesty and integrity with these specializations, it so appears – from the latest US Department of Labour statistics – that the most esteemed professional fields are also the most exploitative ones as well. At least so far as gender inequality is concerned.

In legal occupations, American women earn 56 cents per dollar that the men earn. Legal professions include the jobs of lawyers, judges, magistrates, other judicial workers, paralegals, legal assistants, and miscellaneous legal support workers. Likewise, in the medical profession, among the physicians and surgeons, women earn 64 cents per dollar the men earn. Third highest hall of shame is reserved for business management executives. Female financial managers earn 66 cents per dollar their male counterparts earn and women human resources managers earn 69 cents per dollar.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women still lag far behind men in almost all the industries. The inequality exists most clearly for instance among physicians and surgeons (women $1,228, men $1,914), loan counsellors (women $754, men $1,118), purchasing managers (women earn $1,029 weekly, men earn $1,383), claims adjusters, investigators (women $845, men $1,128), computer programmers (women $1,182, men $1,267), lawyers (women $1,449, men $1,934), postsecondary teachers (women $1,030, men $1,342), retail salespersons (women $443, men $624), real estate brokers (women $745, men $939), inspectors, testers (women $513, men $754), financial services sales agents (women $798, men $1,237), etc.

Among several hundreds of jobs that were surveyed, women were found to be earning slightly more than the men only in the fields of bartending and baking.

As we begin the Women’s History Month, the above serve as timely reminders as to how the history needs to be revisited and radical feminist movements be reintroduced.

There’s no question that his advertisement is discriminatory under federal law, and it’s hard to believe anyone would try to defend it with a straight face without sounding like Nathan Thurm, the nervous, sweating, chain smoking lawyer played by Martin Short on SNL.

    A Bona Fide Occupational Qualification (BFOQ) is a defense to acknowledged discrimination under basic civil rights laws, where an employer is permitted to discriminate against an employee on the basis of religion, sex, national origin or age in those instances where those protected statuses are a “bona fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of the particular business or enterprise.” 

    On a case by case basis, to determine if a discriminatory policy constitutes a BFOQ, first look at the particular job in question and what it requires to perform it.  Then look to the discriminatory policy and determine if it is necessary to performing that job.  For example, airline pilots are prohibited from serving as captain after reaching the age of 60.  This discriminatory rule is based on the reasonable notion that a pilot’s skills deteriorate with age, and that the safety of the passengers depend most essentially on the captain.    Yet, if a 60 year old pilot is working as a flight engineer, for example, he could not be fired for this reason, as age is not a BFOQ for that position.  This exception also holds true for French restaurants hiring exclusively French-born chefs, for example, but would fail if used to support the failure to hire a non-French janitor, as it’s not “reasonably necessary” to the authenticity of the restaurant.  Similarly, a religious school may discriminate in its hiring decisions regarding its faculty, limiting acceptable religious beliefs to the school’s denomination, but it may not do so with its secretarial hiring decisions, as whether the secretary is Catholic or not has no connection to the integrity of its Catholic identity.

    The employer must prove “plainly and unmistakably” that the admitted discriminatory policy, such as only hiring male “housepersons” meets the terms and spirit of this narrow BFOQ exception to our civil rights statutes.  An employer  must demonstrate (and ultimately prove in court) that its discriminatory practice is “reasonably related” to an essential operation of its business, which is often a common sense analysis, such as, whether a men’s clothing manufacturer would be permitted to advertise to hire only male models (it would). 

    In the case of this advertised housekeeping position, not only isn’t there a reasonable relationship between the job description given and the male gender of the applicant, there isn’t even an rationale, articulable basis to argue for such a counter-intuitive and just plain silly and obvious sex discriminatory advertisement.  I’m sure the real reason is something as mundane, typical, customary and sad as the owner’s strong preference for hiring only men. 

Most of us are still blissfully, ignorantly unaware, as our free press is mostly anything but free, corporate-owned and under contract, that the US Supreme Court changed the world as we know it at the beginning of this year. In Citizens United, the five majority, right-wing, corporatist crazies voted to grant corporations personhood, free-speech rights and the unrestricted opportunity to inject billions of dollars into the body politic, throwing their overbearing financial weight behind politicians who will support corporate greed over the needs of we the people and the commons we all share. The decision was a huge victory for Wall Street banks, big oil, the “health” insurance industry and other transnational corporations and the billionaires who run them, and a huge defeat for the rest of us, as well as the for the planet itself. A true travesty.

What does corporate money and influence buy? Everything, of course. Just last week, the heavily business lobbied Senate Republicans unanimously voted against a measure that would have finally help address pay discrimination against women in the workplace. The Paycheck Fairness Act passed the House of Representatives nearly two years ago, but it can’t seem to gain traction with those Senate boys (don’t they like and respect their own wives, daughters and mothers?) despite the consistent polls showing that over 84% of Americans support equal pay for women, our elected GOPers won’t even let the bill come up for a discussion, let alone a debate. They all sided, yet again, with the Chamber of Commerce, because if they paid women the same as they paid men, there would be less money remaining for seven figure CEO bonuses. This despite the fact that women with identical education, experience and qualifications make only 77 cents on the dollar of what men make. Over the course of a 40-year career, it’s estimated that women lose out on upwards of a million dollars in total wages due to this discrimination, and the Senate and Chamber of Commerce want it to continue that way.

“School Lunches? Eat Fucking Tree Bark… Reaganomics, Ladies and Gentlemen, Reaganomics.” Richard Belzer, Catch a Rising Star, circa 1984

The U.S Department of Agriculture also recently reported that 17.4 million American households had trouble finding enough food to eat last year. That’s 1 out of every 8 homes–someone went hungry at some point throughout the year. Children in single parent households were most affected by this food shortage–all in all–14% of the households in our country experienced hunger. And these numbers could have been much higher–the Department of Agriculture reports that although the number of hungry families shot up much higher in 2007 when the recession began, it has held steady since, thanks in large part to federal programs like the supplemental nutritional assistance program and free and reduced school lunches. Moreover, economists have proven that federal food assistance programs actually have a stimulative effect on the program. Every dollar given out in food stamps produces a $1.73 in economic activity as it circulates from the hungry person to the retail stores to the wholesaler to the farmer. And yet Republicans still insist that a 3% tax cut for millionaires and billionaires, so that they can then put more money in foreign banks, is a better stimulus for America, and they are willing to cut food assistance programs to pay for it. As Thom Hartmann characterized this maddening fact; “There you have it, the Republican Party literally taking food off the table of hungry Americans, so fat cat banksters can get a million dollar tax giveaway bonus, borrowed from China and handed to those billionaires, courtesy of you and me by the Republican Party.”

Obama administration must be commended for its newly announced support for the Paycheck Fairness Act (S. 182). This bill – a much needed update to the Equal Pay Act of 1963 – would take steps toward finally closing the wage gap between men and women by closing loopholes in the current law and strengthening weak remedies. Passage of the bill is one of the recommendations made by the administration’s Equal Pay Enforcement Task Force.
 
The Paycheck Fairness Act would provide workers with the tools they need to ensure equal compensation, including fair remedies, additional enforcement tools and technical assistance and training for both employers and employees. Last year, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Paycheck Fairness Act; the bill currently has 40 co-sponsors in the Senate and is poised for passage.

Here is the statement by the President –

In America today, women make up half of the workforce, and two-thirds of American families with children rely on a woman’s wages as a significant portion of their families’ income.
Yet, even in 2010, women make only 77 cents for every dollar that men earn. The gap is even more significant for working women of color, and it affects women across all education levels. As Vice President Biden and the Middle Class Task Force will discuss today, this is not just a question of fairness for hard-working women. Paycheck discrimination hurts families who lose out on badly needed income. And with so many families depending on women’s wages, it hurts the American economy as a whole. In difficult economic times like these, we simply cannot afford this discriminatory burden.
My Administration has already begun to address this problem. In my first week in office, I signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which helps women who face wage discrimination recover their lost wages, and in my State of the Union Address, I promised to crack down on violations of equal pay laws. Today the Equal Pay Enforcement Task Force will present its recommendations, which include ways to better coordinate among enforcement agencies and inform employees about their rights. These steps support women, and they also support businesses that are doing the right thing and paying their employees what they deserve.
We cannot do this work alone. So today, I thank the House for its work on this issue and encourage the Senate to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, a common-sense bill that will help ensure that men and women who do equal work receive the equal pay that they and their families deserve. Passing this bill is one of the Task Force’s key recommendations, and I hope Congress will act swiftly so that I can sign it into law.

On Monday, the jury had found Novartis liable for gender discrimination in pay, promotions and pregnancy-related matters. “Today’s punitive damage award is meant to punish the company for its past actions and to deter it and others from continuing to discriminate against female employees in the future,” said Sanford Wittels & Heisler LLP.

Twelve former Novartis sales representatives were awarded $3.36 million in compensatory damages on Tuesday