Channel: Economy
Women Don’t Ask? No, Employers Don’t Pay
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This is a cross-post by Ellen Bravo, former director of 9to5, National Association of Working Women and author of Taking on the Big Boys: Or Why Feminism Is Good for Families, Business and the Nation.
Congratulations, working women! As of today, your salary since January 1, 2007, has finally reached the total earned by your male colleagues in 2007 alone. What’s more, this pay gap is all your fault!
According to the media, the problem is that women just don’t ask. If we learned to speak up in salary negotiations, pay equity would be a hard fact.
An ABC News segment called the negotiation process “something that each of us has the ability to control....No employer has an obligation to whisper in the woman's ear, 'Hey, you know, you just lost out on more money because you didn't speak up.'”
Stories like these leave out a few important realities: The majority of women work in jobs where they have no right whatsoever to negotiate for pay. Many are like Donna, a software developer whose employment agreement lists “discussing salary with colleagues” among “fire-able offenses.” Hard to know you’re making less than others if you’re not allowed to know what the others earn.
Women at Greater Risk in Today’s Bad Economy
Women are at greater economic risk in today's sinking economy than in past recessions, a new report shows. In the past year, women's real wages fell by 3 percent, compared with half a percentage point for men's wages.
The report comes as the nation is set to mark Equal Pay Day tomorrow and just days before the U.S. Senate votes on a bill to give workers, especially women workers, stronger protection from pay discrimination.
Female workers have suffered more job loss and reductions in wages during the past few months than has the general population and have fewer financial firewalls than male workers to protect them when they lose their jobs, according to the report from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
More Layoffs, Fewer Hours on the Job and Teachers Forced to Take Second Jobs
Stuff happens. And lots of stuff happens without the mainstream media picking it up or putting it together in a way that shows the broader picture of what's going on.
Here are a few items of note today:
- Word is out that AT&T plans to cut about 4,600 jobs across the country to "streamline" operations, while Citigroup announced it will cut 9,000 jobs over the next 12 months, after losing $5.1 billion in the first quarter of 2008. In the past 12 months, 1 million workers have been added to the jobless rolls and some 3 million are expected to exhaust their unemployment insurance (UI) benefits before finding work in 2008. The AFL-CIO has been pushing hard for Congress to extend UI benefits beyond the current 26 weeks as part of a stimulus package to address growing joblessness and a nose-diving economy. Bush says he will veto such a bill.
Workers with Employer-Covered Health Care Declined by 6.4 Million
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Here's another reason why most of us in the United States are not better off now than seven years ago: 6.4 million fewer workers had employer-provided health insurance in 2006 than in 2000. These data released this week from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) show the decline in coverage has taken place across the spectrum of age, education, occupation, industry, race and ethnicity. Further, EPI notes:
While workers with more education are more likely to receive health insurance from their employers, workers from all education levels have seen similar declines in coverage. Specifically, workers with no more than a high school education saw a decline of 5.0 percentage points, workers with some college education but no bachelor's degree saw a decline of 4.2 percentage points, and workers with a college degree or more saw a decline of 3.6 percentage points.
Can You Spend $3 Trillion Better than Bush?
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It's not easy spending $3 trillion. I tried (see below). But then again I wasn't buying a quagmire in the Middle East. That price tag—$3 trillion—is what the Bush administration is spending on the war in Iraq, says Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
The checks paid for with our taxpayers' dollars that Bush is writing for the war means other checks are not in the mail—not for health care, rebuilding New Orleans or the nation's infrastructure, education, job training, or maybe even lending a hand to homeowners trapped in the foreclosure crisis.
Unemployment Benefits Extension Advances
More than 200,000 jobless workers a month run out of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits without finding new jobs. Some 3.5 million unemployed workers are expected to exhaust their benefits this year.
That’s six months without work or prospects for a new job in an economy that is shedding jobs and on a downward spiral that most economists say isn’t even close to bottoming out.
Yesterday, the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee took the first step to helping the long-term jobless when it passed a bill (H.R. 5749) to provide an additional 13 weeks of UI benefits for jobless workers in every state and an additional 13 weeks to those in states with high unemployment rates.
Gap Between America’s Rich and Poor Worsened in Past Two Decades
The gap between the wealthiest and the rest of us grew significantly during the past two decades, leaving lower- and middle-class families at more risk during the current economic downturn/recession confronting the nation, a new study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) finds.
The report says that lower- and middle-income families are much more vulnerable to rough economic times and income loss because they have higher debt loads and are seeing the value of their homes plummet while wealthier families are likely to have savings and other assets to ride out the storm.
Laid Off And Left Out: New Web Source Just in Time
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Looks like the National Employment Law Project (NELP) has relaunched its site, Laid Off & Left Out, just in time. With the unemployment rate at 5.1 percent and first-time jobless claims at the highest level since the Hurricane Katrina aftermath in 2005, workers without jobs need help in making ends meet.
Millions will cash their last unemployment insurance (UI) checks without having found new work, leaving them and their families to fend for themselves.
First launched in the 2001 recession to provide information about the unemployment situation, Laid Off & Left Out helps jobless workers by mobilizing support for extending UI benefits. Click here to visit the site.
After the last recession, Congress temporarily extended UI benefits by 13 weeks. But that’s not enough, and NELP is among the organizations joining us in urging Congress to extend benefits by several more weeks.
U.S. Jobs Tank Big Time
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Employers slashed 83,000 jobs in March, according to this morning's monthly jobs report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, worsening the nation's unemployment rate to 5.1 percent, up three-tenths of a percentage point since February. The job loss was far worse than even the most pessimistic of predictions, and was spread across industries, with the biggest losses in the construction and manufacturing sectors.
The unemployment figures follow yesterday's Labor Department report showing the number of first-time claims for unemployment benefits increased last week to the highest level since just after Hurricane Katrina in September 2005. Initial jobless claims climbed by 38,000 in the week that ended March 29 to 407,000.
40 Years After King’s Death, Unions Still Best Route to Better Life for African Americans
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 40 years ago this week in the midst of a campaign to support striking Memphis sanitation workers who were trying to gain better pay and working conditions by joining a union.
Now, a new report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) shows that four decades after King's death, union membership is still the best route to a better life for African American workers. Unions and Upward Mobility for African-American Workers found that black union workers earned, on average, 38 percent more than their nonunion peers. Click here to read the entire report.
