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Way back in September, the Senate filed cloture on three bills that would be taken up at the beginning of the lame duck session. Of those three, Harry Reid postponed the cloture vote on a electric vehicles/natural gas bill, seemingly because Tom Harkin wanted to hijack it to add ethanol funding, and also to get some Republicans on board.
That left two bills. On the Paycheck Fairness Act, a companion to the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which would have set limits on employers defending wage discrimination in court based on gender. But the bill only got 58 votes for cloture on the motion to proceed, which in Senate math is a loss. It’s kind of a fitting bookend to the Lily Ledbetter bill, which was the first President Obama signed into law. Now they can’t even get something along the same lines passed. Here’s Harry Reid’s response:
“Apparently, my Republican colleagues would rather continue giving tax breaks to CEOs who ship American jobs overseas than ensure that women in Nevada and across the nation are paid the same as men for doing the same work. Senate Republicans had their latest opportunity to do the right thing, work with Democrats to reduce wage inequality for women, and help the American families they support. This was a prime opportunity to enact the kind of common-sense, bipartisan solutions to our economic problems that the American people are demanding, but Republicans spurned it.
“Democrats are eager to work with Republicans to address our shared challenges, but compromise is a two-way street. I am hopeful that moving forward, Republicans put partisanship aside and focus on doing what’s right and fair for the American people.”
So that left the food safety bill. Where Democrats and Republicans did work together to address our shared challenges! Huzzah! By a 74-25 vote, the Senate agreed to invoke cloture on a motion to proceed. And there was much rejoicing.
The Wall Street Journal had a story on the food safety bill today. There would still be some amendments voted on, but the Senate could wrap up the bill by the end of the week. It would have to go back to the House, or somehow reconciled in both chambers, before moving to the President. The bill gives more authority to the FDA to make recalls of food products, and more funding for inspections, paid for by the food industry.
At least Democrats and Republicans can (mostly) come together in opposition to salmonella in your mushroom omelette.
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So the Paycheck Fairness Act failed to pass?
Many people will breathe a sigh of relief.
Nothing has worked to close the gender wage gap — not the 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, not Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, not the 1991 amendments to Title VII, not affirmative action, not diversity… Nor will the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act work. The wage gap will stubbornly persist because pay-equity advocates continue to ignore this:
Despite the 40-year-old demand for women’s equal pay, millions of wives still choose to have no pay at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of “The Secrets of Happily Married Women,” stay-at-home wives, including the childless, constitute a growing niche. “In the past few years,” he says in a CNN August 2008 report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier….” at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka. Perhaps more women are staying at home because feminists and the media have told them relentlessly for years that women are paid less than men in the same jobs, and so why bother working if they’re going to be penalized and humiliated for being a woman.)
As full-time mothers or homemakers, stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living in luxury? Because they’re supported by their husband.
If millions of wives can accept no wages and live as well as their husbands, millions of other wives can accept low wages, refuse to work overtime, refuse promotions, take more unpaid days off, avoid uncomfortable wage-bargaining (http://preview.tinyurl.com/23qycq)— all of which lowers women’s average pay. They can do this because they are supported by husbands who must earn more than if they’d remained single — which is how MEN help create the wage gap. (If the roles were reversed so that men raised the children and women raised the income, men would average lower pay than women.)
By the way, the next Equal Occupational Fatality Day is in 2020. The year 2020 is how far into the future women will have to work to experience the same number of work-related deaths that men experienced in 2009 alone. See http://tinyurl.com/yab2blv