Womenstake, NWLC's Blog

Passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act is a Moral Imperative

By Lexie Kuznick

On Wednesday, July 11, 2007, the Workforce Protections Subcommittee of the House Committee on Education and Labor held a hearing on the Paycheck Fairness Act (H.R. 1338).  Congressional attention to this bill comes at a critical juncture in employment discrimination law, as the Supreme Court has recently further entrenched sex discrimination and unequal pay in its Ledbetter v. Goodyear decision.   Our own Marcia Greenberger testified at Wednesday’s hearing, emphasizing to the Committee that the Paycheck Fairness Act would address basic inadequacies in the current Equal Pay Act and reaffirm Congress’s commitment to realizing gender equity within the workplace in the wake of recent setbacks.

Nearly 45 years after the Equal Pay Act was signed into law, equal pay for men and women is still not a reality.  Although it’s true that progress has been made (in 1963 women earned only 59 cents for every dollar earned by men) today women working full-time year-round still earn only about 77 cents for every dollar earned by men –hardly a cause for celebration.

(Think Congress should do something about it?)

by Rebecca Wilkins and Joan Entmacher

Tomorrow, the Senate Finance Committee is holding a hearing with the unbelievably boring title of “Carried Interest, Part I.” But before you yawn and ignore this hearing (or this post), consider this:  CEO Stephen Schwarzman reportedly will receive as much as $677 million from the “carried interest” he receives for managing The Blackstone Group, which went public last month. That’s an impressive amount of money—but the real kicker is that he’ll only pay 15% federal income tax on that income. That's the same tax bracket that a single worker is in if she earns between $16,575 and $40,600 (assuming she claims the personal exemption and standard deduction).  A single worker earning between $40,600 and $85,850 is in a 25% bracket.

And Schwarzman’s not alone in earning unimaginable sums of money—and paying taxes on those earnings at a lower rate than millions of middle-class workers. Top hedge fund managers, some earning over $1 billion a year, also manage to pay tax on most of their income at just 15%.

How is this possible?  Two words:  capital gains. 

By Lexie Kuznick

In his own peculiar way, President Bush recently announced his support for female athletes and Title IX: “I’m a big backer of Title IX…I think the progress, though, has been startling from the day when there were hardly any women’s team.” Given the Administration’s record on Title IX, we wonder if he thought being a “big backer” meant pushing Title IX’s achievements “back” a few notches.  Let’s take a real look at what it means to have the “backing” of the Bush administration: