Obama Supports Closing Pay Gap for Working Women

by Seth Michaels, Jul 11, 2008

Yesterday, while discussing his economic agenda in Fairfield, Va., Sen. Barack Obama spoke especially to the concerns of working women.

As shown in Working America’s Ask a Working Woman survey, women are especially vulnerable in the nation’s economic crisis. Working women have less earning power to deal with the high cost of energy, health care and education because they still are paid less than their male counterparts. In fact, the WAGE Project estimates the wage gap costs the average full-time U.S. woman worker between $700,000 and $2 million over the course of her work life.

Obama says that in a U.S. economy that works for all, women must receive fair treatment in the workplace:

We won’t truly have an economy that puts the needs of the middle class first until we ensure that when it comes to pay and benefits at work, women are treated like the equal partners they are.

Obama’s campaign has released a report laying out what his economic agenda would mean for women and for all working families. Among his proposals:

• A tax cut for middle- and lower-income individuals and families.
• Expanding child care tax credits and the Earned Income Tax Credit.
• Providing paid sick leave to workers.
• Closing the gender gap in paychecks.
• Emphasizing early childhood education and after-school and summer learning programs for children.

Obama, who co-sponsored the Employee Free Choice Act and has pledged to sign it as president, said the freedom to form unions was an essential part of ensuring that the economy works for women.

I’ll work as a partner with our unions, because we know that when it comes to standing up for women’s rights in the workplace, our unions are second to none—and it’s time we starting giving them the support they deserve.

Also in yesterday’s speech, Obama referred to Sen. John McCain’s top economic adviser, Phil Gramm, who this week claimed the nation’s economic crisis is all in our heads and said that working families’ financial concerns amount to “whining.”

Let’s be clear, when people are struggling with the rising costs of everything from gas to groceries, when we’ve lost 438,000 jobs over the past six months, when typical families have seen their incomes fall nearly $1,000 since 2000, this economic downturn isn’t in our heads. It isn’t whining to ask for more than just psychological relief.  

And I think it’s time we had a president who doesn’t deny our problems—or blame the American people for them—but takes responsibility and provides the leadership to solve them. That’s the kind of president I will be.

Obama has made the economy a focus of his campaign this week. On Monday, he gave an economic address in St. Louis. In a Tuesday appearance, he criticized the 2005 bankruptcy bill, a finance industry-designed creation that made it harder for families to deal with economic shocks like medial problems and the current mortgage crisis. Obama proposed new rules on bankruptcy to protect seniors and military families. His campaign also released a new ad stressing relief on energy prices and delivered a speech in Ohio today on energy.

McCain, meanwhile, has taken economic positions that starkly contrast with Obama’s proposals.

• In a town meeting today, he claimed to support equal pay for women, despite a long record of opposing laws that would ensure equal pay for equal work, like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
• Just this week, he attacked Social Security.
• He tried to distance himself from Gramm’s insulting comments that Americans are having a “mental recession”—but McCain has said repeatedly that our economic problems are “psychological.”
• His economic plans center around hundreds of billions in corporate tax cuts, not relief for working families.

McCain and his campaign team just don’t get it when it comes to the economy. Obama is proposing bottom-line solutions that would help working families weather the storm.

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Paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Political Contributions Committee, www.aflcio.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

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