Campaign for fair pay

Pay, compensation or salary is very important to every worker, be it on the executive level, ordinary worker or part-time or contract worker. We should not belabour ourselves on the reasons why. It is clear that one needs pay for the work done to be able to sustain one’s life, support a family or love ones, buy necessities like food, medicines and pay for healthcare, among others. So it is important to get the right pay commensurate to the work done or accomplished. To put it better, the American Association of University Women states that the size of your paycheck affects how much you can afford to spend at the grocery store, the gas station, the doctor’s office, and on a number of other important day-to-day purchases (let’s not forget the cost of rent). And, according to the AAUW, your take-home pay isn’t the only consideration. Your starting salary becomes the basis for future raises — so if you start out at a lower level because you don’t negotiate your salary, then you’ve likely set yourself up to have a smaller salary down the line even if all the employees in your office receive the same 6 percent raise.
But the right pay is not only important for the present. It should also be good for the future. This is so because with the right pay, you can save for your future, you can assure a decent retirement after years of hard work. Once you’re retired, you’ll wish you had negotiated the just and correct salary from the start. This is well demonstrated in the case of fair pay icon Lilly Ledbetter (the woman for whom the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is named). According to AAUW, Lilly, now 75, is struggling to make ends meet on pension and Social Security benefits that are lower than she deserves because she was making 40 percent less than her male colleagues over a nearly 20-year career at Goodyear. Although the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act fixed the wrong-headed Supreme Court decision in Lilly’s case, it doesn’t fix the years of pay discrimination she faced and the effects that she still lives with today.
It is for this reason that the AAUW has been spearheading the campaign for fair pay. The group has even directed its appeal to US President Barack Obama, USSenators Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer; Congresswoman Jackie Speier; Assemblywoman Fiona Ma and State Senator Leland Y. Yee and a host of other leaders, according to Margaret M. Ellis, Co-Chair of the AAUW-NP Public Policy Interest Group. In a statement, the AAUW said it joins Lilly Ledbetter in urging President Obama and the US Congress to make progress on equal pay for equal work in 2014, pointing out that progress on the issue has stalled in the five years since President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. “Congress and President Obama both need to stop resting on their Ledbetter laurels,” said Linda D. Hallman, CAE, executive director and CEO of AAUW. “They cannot always fall back on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act as if all the work to close the gender pay gap were finished.” It added that the Ledbetter Act, which was signed into law on January 29, 2009, simply reversed a bad U.S. Supreme Court decision and restored the long-standing interpretation of civil rights laws that allowed employees to challenge every discriminatory paycheck.
We support the call of the Public Policy Interest Group of the AAUW-NP of San Mateo County for the passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act in 2014 described as the necessary companion legislation to the Ledbetter bill. As Ledbetter has said, “Giving women my Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act without the Paycheck Fairness Act is like giving them a nail without the hammer.” We agree with the group that the stalled Paycheck Fairness Act would help create stronger incentives for employers to pay workers fairly, empower women to negotiate for equal pay, and prohibit retaliation against employees who share salary information.