Average Woman Worker Loses Nearly Half a Million to Pay
Discrimination
http://www.truthout.org/123108WA
Gadsen, Alabama - Lilly Ledbetter, the longtime Goodyear tire
supervisor whose pay discrimination case against her firm went all the
way to the Supreme Court, lost $223,776 in lifetime earnings due to 19
years of discrimination at the tire firm's Gadsden, Ala., plant, a new
report says.
As it turns out, Ledbetter, who lost her case before the Supreme
Court, was somewhere between average and lucky. Her earnings loss was
half the national average of lifetime earnings losses, $434,000 per
woman, that female workers suffer compared to male counterparts in the
same jobs.
But Ledbetter's Goodyear career covered only half of the gentle
gray-haired grandmother's working life. Take those 19 years and double
them, and Lilly Ledbetter is a typical female worker in the U.S., the
report says.
At least in Alabama, she wasn't in the state where woman worker
are worst off. Nor, as a company supervisor, was Ledbetter the worst
off among all female workers, analysis of federal data shows.
In Lifetime Losses: The Career Wage Gap, Jessica Arons of the
Center for American Progress, a liberal and pro-worker think tank,
showed lifetime earnings of average female workers trailed those of
their male counterparts by hundreds of thousands of dollars. In one
profession, the law, the gap is $1.48 million.
And the pay gap understates the lifetime earnings chasm, Arons
noted. Quoting Ledbetter, Arons pointed out the lifetime gap not only
affects a woman's pay but her pension levels and her Social Security
earnings base. All are lower.
Arons explained the huge lifetime losses occur because the typical
female worker, after adjusting for other factors, earns 78 cents for
every dollar a male worker doing the same job earns. Take that and
multiply it by a woman's working career, and compound the gap every
year, and you get differences ranging from $270,000 over 42 years
(ages 24-65) in Vermont to almost three times as much ($728,000) in
Wyoming.
The greatest difference between men and women workers was in legal
services. That's because while 51% of the legal profession is female,
the women start out in lower pay brackets and are concentrated in the
lower-paying areas of the legal world. The men are the high-paid law
firm partners, the women are lower-paid legal aides.
The smallest lifetime gap was among "installation, maintenance and
repair workers," where the difference was only $84,000 over a working
woman's lifetime. But even then, there was a problem, Arons noted: The
profession is only 4% female.
"It should be hard to have any gap when virtually no women work in
a given field. The fact that a wage gap exists at all, despite being
the smallest gap, suggests pay equity remains a large problem in that
sector. Moreover, it is evident additional effort is needed to better
integrate the entire workforce," she said.
"And even an $84,000 gap, averaging out to a shortfall of $2,000 a
year, can be a large hit to a family at the lower end of the economic
spectrum," Arons noted. As for Ledbetter, the earnings gap in Alabama
was $445,000 over a woman's working career. And for an average
supervisor nationwide, the male-female lifetime gap was $635,000.
Arons pointed out the lifetime earnings gap has a huge impact on
women, men and families. "Lower wages for women hurt men and society
as well. American men work the longest hours in the industrialized
world and have the smallest amount of leisure time, often so that
their wives can increase the time they spend on family caregiving
duties or in order to make up for their wives' lower wages.
"Society, moreover, loses out on additional tax revenue from women
while having to increase spending on safety net programs for women who
are not paid a living wage," she wrote.
Arons also suggested six measures to help close the lifetime
earnings gap. Her recommendations included labor-backed legislation to
reverse the Supreme Court ruling against Ledbetter and other female
workers, and the Employee Free Choice Act, labor's top legislative
goal in the next Congress.
"This bill would make it easier for employees to form unions,
establish stronger penalties for employers who interfere with the
right of workers to form a union, and provide mediation and
arbitration when necessary to ensure employers bargain with new unions
over a first contract in good faith. Union membership increases
women's weekly earnings by 38.2% and men's by 26.0%. Women of color
and low-wage earners are helped even more by unionization," Arons
wrote of the workers' rights bill.
Though Arons did not say so, the pay gap between male and female
union wor-kers is smaller than the overall yearly pay gap. The most
recent data on median weekly earnings, in 2007, show all working
women's median weekly wages were 80 cents for every dollar a man
earned. Union women's wages were 87 cents per dollar.
Ledbetter knows about that, too. As a supervisor, not covered by
labor law, she suffered the pay discrimination. At one congressional
hearing on legislation -- named for her -- to overturn the court's
ruling and to let woman workers sue firms for sexual pay
discrimination, she told Press Associates Union News Service she
believes rank-and-file female workers at Gadsden suffer little pay
discrimination. Why? They're covered by Goodyear's union contract,
with the Steel Workers.
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