On Equal Pay Day on April 3, hundreds of union, women's, civil rights and community groups from Washington state to Maine launched grassroots campaigns to urge an end to gender and race-based pay discrimination.

April 3 marks the day this year that women's earnings in 2000 and 2001 combined caught up to what men earned in 2000 alone. Recent polls by union and other groups – including the AFL-CIO's survey of working women – show that equal pay is a top legislative priority for women.

The National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) reported that more than 250 local organizations in 41 states, including local unions and chapters of the Business and Professional Women/USA and the American Association of University Women, planned state and local press conferences, lobbying, state legislative hearings, leafleting, rallies and other events to advocate equal pay.

In Maine, advocates celebrated the state's new pay equity laws, while at a Michigan press conference, Pay Equity Network leaders joined Democratic state Sen. Alma Wheeler-Smith to announce her introduction of a new pay equity bill. In Montgomery, Ala., supporters urged passage of legislation pending in that state. Other events were held or scheduled in state capitals in Washington, Nevada, Texas, Missouri, Illinois, Delaware and Massachusetts.

At a Capitol Hill press conference, AFL-CIO Executive Vice Pres. Linda Chavez-Thompson said: "It takes women more than 15 months to earn as much as men earn in 12 months because women make only 72 cents for every dollar that men earn."

According to the NCPE, women's earnings dropped in 1999 from 1998, when they averaged 73 cents on the dollar compared with men's earnings. The gap is worse for minority women, NCPE said. African American women make 65 percent of white men's earnings, and Latinas make 52 percent.

NCPE also pointed out wage disparities for minority men. The earnings ratio for African American men is 81 percent. For Hispanic men it is 62 percent.

"We are urging women to call on their elected officials at the federal and state level to pass stronger laws so that every worker gets equal pay for an equal day's work," Chavez-Thompson said.

Supporting pending legislation on equal pay issues during a Capitol Hill press conference from left are Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.); Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa); Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.); and Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.).

Toward this goal, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.C.) introduced the Fair Pay Act of 2001. The bill would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to require employers to provide equal pay for work in jobs that are comparable in skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions.

Harkin said: "Unfairly low pay in jobs dominated by women is un-American. It is discriminatory, and my bill would make it illegal. It's been 38 years since the Equal Pay Act became law, but we still need to close the door on pay discrimination against women."

"The reason we have a pay gap is because women are segregated into women-dominated occupations and pay tracks gender," Norton said. To those who say the answer is for women to move out of these occupations, she asked: "How much do we want to encourage people to leave teaching, nursing, child care and other female-dominated occupations? There is a frightening flight from these occupations" as women seek better pay in other occupations.

Norton said she is asking other legislators to sign onto a petition for the General Accounting Office to study the 20 state governments that already have performed job evaluations and adjusted pay to equalize female and male-dominated jobs.

Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) noted that Minnesota is one of the states that made this change. In Minnesota, "we have one of the strongest comparable worth laws in the country," he said. "Equal pay is not just a women's issue," he said. "It is a children's issue, a family issue, and an economic justice issue."

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) noted that unequal pay costs American families an average of $4,000 a year. Pay equality is "a matter of fundamental fairness and equity," she said.

To opponents of equal pay legislation who claim the wage gap is due to other factors, such as women interrupting careers for childbearing or opting for more "flexibility," Clinton said that "study after study and personal experience puts the lie to that argument. . . . Whether it's tenured women professors at [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] or women in factories or offices, we have not achieved the dream since 1963 to achieve equality in the workplace."

Sen. Patty Murray (D.-Wash.) pointed out that the "wage disparity is a life-long problem for women because it follows them into retirement. Women are twice as likely to live in poverty over age 65. Women are more dependent upon Social Security for a greater percentage of their retirement income. And because of lower lifetime wages, many women are unable to contribute to private pensions or retirement savings."

Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.), a primary sponsor of the Paycheck Fairness Act to strengthen enforcement powers for the 1963 equal pay law, said pay inequality "is about undervaluing the work that women do," and it hurts children and families. She pointed out that two-thirds of working women provide half or more of household income. "It's time for us as a nation to say that we value women's work," she said.

Pay gap and tax cut

In a statement, Senate Democratic Minority Leader Tom Daschle (S.D.) said the need to close the pay gap "takes on new urgency this year because the $2 trillion-plus tax cut Republicans are trying to push through Congress threatens to make the pay gap larger, not smaller."

"Supporters of the Republican tax cut talk a lot about the need to help single working moms," Daschle said. "The truth is, a single mother with two children doesn't even begin to benefit from the Bush tax cut until she makes $22,000 a year. More than one-third of all single mothers – and almost half of all black and Hispanic single mothers – would receive no tax cut under the president's plan. And many working mothers who get some tax relief under the Republican plan could see much of the benefit wiped out by cuts in child care and other essential services that will be needed to pay for the tax cut."

President Bush also came under attack from Democrats for withholding the results of a Labor Department equal pay study of federal contractors and for shutting down the White House women's affairs office.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe said in a statement that it "is ironic that Equal Pay Day falls a week after it was reported that President Bush closed the White House Office for Women's Initiatives and Outreach, literally shutting out American women's voices on policies and issues that affect them." Bush's message to women seems to be: 'we don't care about your issues.'"