Lilly Ledbetter speaks before U.S. President Barack Obama signs an executive order banning federal contractors from retaliating against employees during an event in the White House in honor of Equal Pay Day in 2014.
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The announcement comes on the seventh anniversary of the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which makes it easier for employees to challenge wage discrimination in court.
“Most employers don’t set out to pay women less than men”, says Emily Martin, general counsel of the National Women’s Law Center.
The president also said the White House in May will host a summit – “The United State of Women” – to examine gender equality in America.
“One thing that is very clear is that (Obama’s) being consistent with how he’s looked at this issue”, Gillespie said.
Obama’s proposal, which will be published by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Labor, demands companies now include on the forms how they pay each employee, as well as his or her race, gender and ethnicity. Workers who take their discrimination cases to the EEOC, she said, would have objective numbers to back them up. Barry O.is getting bold during his past year of presidency, and he hit the post-holidays ground running with his executive gun control measures, which he pushed through without legislative approval. “While the Fair Pay Act was a huge step forward to ensuring that women have recourse when subjected to unfair pay practices, more progress needs to be made”, said Greenstein, a co-sponsor of the legislation.
EEOC Chair Jenny Yang told reporters Thursday that the rule should be completed by 2016, with the first reports due September 2017.
The President is renewing his call to Congress to take up and pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, commonsense legislation that would give women additional tools to fight pay discrimination.
“Although the EEOC believes that the information they will collect from these new disclosures will allow the agency to identify potential discrimination on the basis of pay, the proposed changes ‘fail to address how the EEOC would account for the myriad of other factors that impact an individual’s pay, like performance, education, and seniority'”. The move is part of the president’s campaign promise to crack down on firms that pay women less for doing the same work as their male counterparts.
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Complying with the new rule will cost less than $400 for each employer in the first year, the White House estimated, and several hundred dollars annually in subsequent years. The gap widens by race, with black women earning 60 cents and Hispanic earning 55 cents to every white man’s buck. This information will be analyzed by race, gender and ethnicity and evaluated for evidence of discriminatory practices, according to the report. The median wage of a full-time female employee is about 79 percent of male counterparts, the White House reported.
