Why I'm Still Fighting for the Paycheck Fairness Act

It would be an understatement to say that I was excited about the Paycheck Fairness Act, which was up for a cloture vote in the Senate earlier this week.  Part of my job at 9to5 is to help with online social media—twitter and Facebook and such.  Asha, our online organizer, told me to get the word out; I’m not sure if she was expecting me to get the word out quite as enthusiastically as I did.  By the end of the day Tuesday, I was sending a tweet about the PFA every half hour—not because anyone told me to, but because I wanted to.  I blogged about it on the 9to5 website.  I posted Joe Biden’s statement on the PFA as my Facebook status.  Senator Grassley back in Iowa probably thinks I’m stalking him, I left so many messages at his office.

I came to work on Wednesday morning overwhelmingly excited.  I was part of a movement, and it felt great.  To use a phrase we like at 9to5, I owned the PFA.  I’d worked to get it passed, and now I felt like the passage of the PFA was a personal issue.

With a slowly growing sense of uneasiness, I watched the votes roll in.  First Sen. Brown voted nay, then Sen. Snowe, then Sen. Collins.  I sunk a little lower in my seat with each update, but I still held out hope for someone having a last minute change of heart.  Then all the votes were in, and, unbelievably, we’d lost.

This was the first time I’d owned a cause that lost.  I’d certainly cared about outcomes of political fights before, but I’d never felt a loss quite so poignantly and personally.  I have the good fortune to say that all the campaigns I’d been really invested in had been successful, up until this point. The defeat of the PFA brought up a hard question I hadn’t had to face yet: What do you do after you lose?

The answer that I’ve settled on, cliché as it is, is that you keep going, because some things are too important to give up on.  Every week, Jayne and I get phone calls from women whose coworkers honestly believe that women don’t deserve the same respect as men.  Giving up on the fight to show the world that women have earned that respect is too important to be brushed aside by forty-one nay votes.

So I’m looking forward to this next legislative session, in the “bring it on” sense of looking forward to it. Because that’s when we get another chance to convince more people of all genders, citizens and elected officials, that women deserve respect, and they deserve marks of that respect: for example, equal pay.  Everyone deserves to be shown their inherent human worth.

In the meantime, I will be writing a stern memo to my senator, Mr. Grassley. I encourage you to do the same to yours.

By Beth Miller, Lutheran Volunteer

Demand Your 23 Cents: Pass the Paycheck Fairness Act

The statistic that women make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes doesn’t mean much to me anymore.  I’ve heard it so many times that I don’t even think about it.  On the surface, 23 cents hardly seems worth making a fuss over.


But it is worth making a fuss, and a big one at that.  Maybe instead of saying women make 77 cents on the dollar, we should say that women earn almost a quarter less than men in comparable jobs.  Worse yet, women of color make a little over half as much as white men.  Imagining my salary with an extra twenty-five percent on it suddenly makes those 23 cents on the dollar very relevant to my life and livelihood.

When I’ve mentioned the wage gap to acquaintances, some tell me that it exists because women choose lower-paying professions, don’t stay in school for as long, have less experience, or choose to stay home with children instead of working.  But according to a Catalyst study, male MBAs fresh out of business school, earned $4,600 more in their first year on the job than their female, childless counterparts (you can read the news story here).  It’s an inescapable conclusion: employers still pay women less than they deserve.
Since the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963, the wage gap has decreased by just a half of a cent each year.  Frankly, that’s not enough.  Women are still cheated out of an average of $10,622 each year.  What could you do with an extra ten thousand dollars next year?

Not only would equal pay improve individual women’s lives, it would benefit the country as a whole.  If women’s pay were equal to men in their same jobs, with their same experience, we could cut the poverty levels in this country in half.  In this economic climate, that’s no small thing.  At the moment, nearly four in ten single mothers live in poverty.  An extra 23 wents could go a long way towards providing for the families that rely on their wages to survive.

Not only do we need fair pay, we deserve it.  We deserve to be treated as equals, and so do our daughters, granddaughters, and all the women who will come after us.  We’ve earned that extra 23 cents.

The Paycheck Fairness Act will come up for a vote in the Senate this week. This bill is a crucial step towards pay equity.  Call your senators today and tell them that you’ve earned your 23 cents, and you want them to help you get it.

Contact your senators through 9to5's Action Alert, or call them at 1-877-667-6650. 

By Beth Miller, 9to5 Lutheran Volunteer

The Casey Foundation’s Equal Voices Campaign: Words from a member

The Marguerite Casey Foundation is a major funder of the Georgia Minimum Wage Coalition, and therefore 9to5 Atlanta as a lead organization of coalition.

The Equal Voices Campaign is an effort to connect the grassroots, leadership education, and social justice organizing campaigns of the Casey Foundation's dozens of grantee organizations nationwide.

 

The annual Convening of Casey Foundation grantees was held in Chicago last month.  Marilynn Winn, chapter leader, and Charmaine Davis, lead organizer, represented the Minimum Wage Coalition and 9to5 at that event.

 

Below are Marilynn’s own words about her experiences:

 

"At the Marguerite Casey Foundation  Equal Voice Convention I gathered a multitude of information on what policy making means to the world, to me, people living in poverty, especially the low-income women of our nation.

 

"To me the positive progress of making and changing our policies is what the Marguerite Casey Foundation Equal Voice stands for. To pull together all the organizations that are funded by that foundation, to focus on strategies that are powerful, effective, and catchy. The enormity of multiple organizations' power is to transform lives.

 

"The Marguerite Casey Foundation Equal Voice is powerful but personal in their touch, and is able and willing to provide the help for the low-income women and people living in poverty.

 

"I give my gratitude and thanks to The Marguerite Casey Foundation Equal Voices for bringing together one thought, one mind, one heart. All together, this is strength and might for equal voices to be heard, through out our nation and the world."

 

For more information about the Casey Foundation, please visit http://www.caseygrants.org/.

 

Support Striking Sodexo Employees

This past Wednesday I walked my first picket line. I marched with Morehouse College cafeteria workers, Morehouse students, and Sevice Employees International Union members protesting the unfair treatment of cafeteria employees by Sodexo Corporation.

Sodexo, a company which can be contracted by schools and companies to provide food service, is the world’s 22^nd-largest employer. In 2008, the company revenues totaled $20 billion. And the recession isn’t slowing Sodexo down: In the first half of fiscal year 2009, its operating profits grew by 7.1%. And yet, Sodexo workers in four states are striking because they are being paid poverty wages and cannot afford the company-offered health care plan. 

 

Though many Sodexo workers are paid at a rate above the minimum wage, the yearly earnings of a worker making $8.50 an hour still fall well beneath the poverty line ($22,050 for a family of four). Earnings are even lower than they first appear: because Sodexo contracts work with schools and colleges, many workers end up unemployed during the summer. In order for a seasonal Sodexo worker to keep her family out of poverty year-round, she would have to make $14.50 an hour. Sodexo’s starting pay of $7.35 an hour falls far short. 

 

All of this would be enough to call for reform, but employees allege being forced to work off the clock and being denied proper overtime pay. Sodexo paid $80 million to settle a race-bias lawsuit filed by 3,000 employees, $60,000 for disciplining an employee who reported sexual assault, and $50,000 to an employee who claimed she was fired because she was pregnant. The U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration has cited the company for 160 violations in the last ten years, including two that resulted in fatalities. At the same time, Sodexo claims that advancing equal opportunity and supporting and valuing employees are fundamental values of the company. 

 

A business that advances equal opportunity would discipline those who commit race and pregnancy discrimination and assault, rather than those who report such actions. A business that supports employees would pay them a wage that would keep their families out of poverty. A business that values its employees would respond to safety hazards responsibly and quickly. Instead, Sodexo keeps its workers in poverty and fear. 

 

By Beth Miller, 9to5 Lutheran Volunteer

Hi! My name is Charmaine Davis. I’m the latest addition to the Atlanta 9to5 office. My first day was Monday June 28th. I’ll be working on the Work-Family, Election Connection and Minimum Wage campaigns as the Lead Organizer. I started my organizing career as a political organizer for Project Vote.

The first campaign I worked on was the Minimum Wage campaign in Ohio. I recruited, trained and managed a staff of over 40 field canvassers who collected over 250,000 petition signatures from registered Ohio voters who supported raising the state minimum wage. We were able to get the initiative on the ballot and mobilize Ohio voters to vote in favor of it. We successfully raised the minimum wage in Ohio from $5.15 to $6.85. This was a huge victory for low-wage workers in Ohio.

In 2007 as a community organizer in Flint, Michigan, I built the membership of Young Urban Voters, a branch of Project Vote, to over 2,500 members. I got the opportunity to work with and develop a lot of young adults and teenagers into active community leaders through one-on-one meetings and mentoring. Later in 2007, I was promoted to national staff with Project Vote, I managed several voter registration drives across the country that registered more than 1 million voters.

In 2009, I interned in the development department of a nonprofit in Chicago. I recently moved to Atlanta and I’m very excited about working with 9to5 and continuing to fight for economic justice!

Working Families Story Bank - Add Your Voice to Support Paid Sick Days!

The Working Families Story Bank is a collection of story portraits of workers and employers across America. Presented by the Family Values at Work Consortium, a national network of 14 regional coalitions, this story bank provides policy makers with a fact checked story resource as they consider regulatory and private sector approaches to issues of concern to working families.

9to5 Chapters in Atlanta, Milwaukee, Denver all contributed stories to the Story Bank - you can just click on your state to listen to the audio portraits of workers telling their story. In Atlanta both of our Community Internship Program participants - Jerrett Johnson and Marilynn Winn - contributed stories for Georgia about what not having paid sick days meant for them, their children, and their parents.

And we are still collecting stories!

Wondering if you might have a story to contribute? Here are some questions to think about:

Have your ever needed paid sick days or family leave but your job didn't offer it?

* How did this affect you?
* Did you lose your job?
* How did it affect your family?
* Did you experience financial difficulty?
* Did your child miss school?
* Did it prevent you from caring for an elderly parent?
* Do you think all employees deserve paid sick days and paid family leave?

If you answered yes to any of these questions -- we want to hear about it! To share you story contact jackie@9to5.org or call 404-222-0037 to set up an appointment.

Atlanta Chapter Meets with U.S. DOL Director of Women's Bureau

Yesterday, Atlanta staff as well as 9to5 member Marilynn Winn had the chance to attend a roundtable discussion with Sara Manzano Diaz, the newly appointed Director of the Women's Bureau at the U.S. Department of Labor. In attendance were the directors and members of dozens of Atlanta and Georgia based organizations all who share the primary focus of promoting the welfare of women and girls in our state. Ms. Manzano Diaz told her personal story of growing up in the Bronx as a child of Puerto Rican immigrants, and the formative experience of gaining the opportunity to move into public housing after living with her entire family in single room occupancy housing.

The discussion revolved around finding concrete ways that Ms. Manzano can move her national agenda of promoting pay equity and work/life balance policies including the Healthy Families Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act, advancing women into higher paying and non-traditional jobs, and supporting the needs of women veterans.

Marilynn Winn reflects on the meeting and what it meant to her to be a part of a group of women working to help other women:

Today I had the opportunity to meet Sara Manzano Diaz, Director of the U.S. Department of Labor Women's Bureau, along with many other powerful leading women who head many different organizations in Atlanta, and across Georgia. These women's goals are to help low-income women and families get out of poverty, and to educate, find resources, and encourage them to speak up and speak out about the problems that keep them bound in a life of poverty.

Being raised in poverty and still living in poverty now has given me the passion, courage, and drive to advocate for families like the family I came from. Every confererence and meeting I attend with these women working for change lets me know that help is out there, and if not it's is being talked about and planned. I have learned no matter where I came from, with the help of others, I can always do better. With each woman that spoke about what her organization offers I learned more about the tools to help myself rise out of poverty.

Get Ready for Change

"History, despite it's wrenching pain, can not be unlived, but if faced with courage need not be lived again"
-Maya Angelou

9to5 has power and courage to fight for issues that many women face day to day. 9to5 is your chance to make change. I have been an intern for 9to5 for a short time and have already witnessed the impact 9to5 is making. Here at 9to5 you immediately notice the power that is being used to address issues like sexual harassment, work/family balance and equal pay. 9to5 understands these issues and are on the front-line working for change. The dedication is amazing and you can be apart of this too by becoming a member.

Our history hows us that facing issues like paid sick leave and equal pay are challenging but with courage, 9to5 is making change on a local and national level.

If you want change, knowledge and support--then 9to5 is here for you! So many people want and need progress. 9to5 is changing the workplace and changing the world for our past, present and future. Be a part of the change we need and join 9to5 as a member today!

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