Lowey revives fair-pay legislation

Women in the Lower Hudson Valley earn 83 cents for every dollar the average man earns, according to the U.S. Labor Department. With the national average at 77 cents, women in the region fare better than women nationwide.

The comparatively better local figure earns no praise from the region”™s long-serving female in the U.S. House of Representatives, Nita Lowey. She is now working to revive a plan that failed last year to level the paying field. She calls the disparity “shameful.”

But what Lowey sees as a remedy for gender-based discrimination is, in the eyes of a pair of prominent business groups, another regulatory millstone that threatens to drown them. Key to their argument is that differing jobs merit different pay ”“ apples and oranges ”“ despite efforts to quantify and analogize every task. They see changes to the current law leading to “second guessing” of pay decisions in the courts.

In Lowey”™s District 18, the Labor Department reports the average male earns $67,866, while the average female earns 83 percent of that: $56,507.

In Sean Patrick Maloney”™s District 19, the numbers are $64,051 for men and $50,774 for women, a gap of 21 percent.

In Eliot Engel”™s District 17, men earn $50,165 to women”™s $43,059, a 14 percent gap.

The Paycheck Fairness Act has been reintroduced in the 113th Congress and Lowey is a co-sponsor of the bill. She reports it is currently pending in the Education and the Workforce Committee. There is also a so-called “discharge petition” circulating in Washington, D.C., which Lowey has signed. If the petition gets 218 signatures the bill will have to be considered by the full House of Representatives. As of April 22, the discharge petition had 188 signatures, Lowey said.

“Our country has a shameful wage gap,” Lowey told the Business Journals via email. “The women of this country and their families deserve better. That”™s why I voted for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and why I am a co-sponsor of the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would strengthen and close loopholes in the 50-year-old Equal Pay Act.”

The Lilly Ledbetter Act was passed in 2009 and is credited with improving women”™s pay via legal recourse. Lowey and others cite pay data that demonstrate the law is flawed and needs revision.

The Paycheck Fairness Act looks to close perceived loopholes in federal wage regulations, including more workplace openness concerning wages. The new law also targets sex-based discrimination in general and imposes stronger deterrents to stop it.

The Paycheck Fairness Act differs from the Fair Pay Act, also as yet unpassed, which would ensure equal pay for jobs that are comparable, but not identical.

The 160,000-member American Association of University Women is backing both resolutions: the Paycheck Fairness Act (H.R. 377) and the Fair Pay Act (438).

Paying men more than women for the same job has been illegal since 1963. But enforcement of the law is weak, contend supporters of the Paycheck Fairness Act, including the American Association of University Women, which has winnowed the data and claims a third of the pay disparity cannot be reasoned as anything but discrimination.

Opponents believe otherwise.

“It would no longer be permissible to pay employees differently based on market forces, negotiating ability or even the amount of revenue they generate for the employer”™s bottom line unless the employer could prove it was a ”˜business necessity,”™” reports the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in a message to members.

The Paycheck Fairness Act, the chamber contends, “would open up compensation and employment decisions to second-guessing by courts and juries, and would ultimately lead to an inefficient, cumbersome and costly salary-setting process.”

The National Association of Manufacturers in a recent letter to U.S. senators, said, “It also would allow women to seek compensatory and punitive damages for pay disparities, and make it easier to pursue class-action lawsuits in these cases. As a result, employers would be exposed to increased threats of litigation ”“ even when unintentional pay disparities may have occurred.

“The Paycheck Fairness Act almost certainly would compel many employers to purchase additional legal liability insurance, increasing their costs and limiting their ability to raise wages, increase benefits or hire new workers,” said the manufacturers”™ letter.

Both the national chamber of commerce and national manufacturers contend the real beneficiaries of this law would be trial lawyers, not women.

When the Paycheck Fairness Act was scuttled last year, U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said, “Shortchanging women on the job doesn”™t just rob them of a fair paycheck. It makes families less secure and slows economic growth across the board. With more dual-income households than ever, and with more families relying on working mothers to make ends meet, the key to economic growth and security for the middle class is equal pay for women.”

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reports 41.5 percent of New York state households rely on women as the primary breadwinners and that women account for 42.6 percent of all family earnings. Those numbers, among others, have led to the naming of April 9 as Equal Pay Day, “a day symbolizing when ”“ more than three months into the year ”“ women”™s wages finally catch up to what men were paid in the previous year,” Lowey said.

As Senate bill No. 84, Lowey reports the Paycheck Fairness Act could reach the Senate floor this month, but is unlikely to muster the 60 votes required to move it forward toward a possible House reconciliation effort.