Abby Lane, Fellow

  • Printer-friendly version
  • Send by email

My Take

Fair Pay Should be Bipartisan

Posted by Abby Lane, Fellow | Posted on: June 05, 2012 at 04:43 pm

This morning the Senate took to the floor to debate the Paycheck Fairness Act (PFA), a bill that would give workers stronger tools to combat wage discrimination, bar retaliation against workers for discussing salary information, and ensure full compensation for victims of gender-based pay discrimination. This afternoon the PFA failed to garner the 60 votes needed to end debate in a 52-47 vote that stuck to party lines.

While I was watching the debate, numerous Senators spoke in support of the PFA. They spoke to the many issues that matter in this fight – the (obvious) reasons women should be paid fairly, how we can boost women’s economic security by passing the PFA, how fair pay for women is good for families, and more. Senator Durbin made a point that particularly resonated with me. He simply said: protection for women and their families used to be bipartisan.

This clearly should be a bipartisan issue. The fact of the matter is that the typical woman working full time, year round is still paid just 77 cents for every dollar paid to her male counterpart, a figure that has barely budged over the last decade. Part of this 23 cent difference can be explained by occupations, work hours, and experience. But the truth of the matter is – much of the wage gap is entirely unaccounted for by these factors, and court cases show that discrimination continues to play a significant role in the wage gap.

Read more...
Tags: Employment, Equal Pay, Paycheck Fairness Act, Senate, Wage Gap, Equal Pay and the Wage Gap, Employment | 1 comment

May Jobs Data Show Gains for Women in a Slow Month for the Recovery

Posted by Abby Lane, Fellow | Posted on: June 01, 2012 at 04:19 pm

Jobs data released this morning for the month of May brought mixed news. Our analysis shows that actual job growth in May was meager; just 69,000 jobs were added to the overall economy. The picture for women was brighter – women gained 95,000 jobs in May, the second largest monthly gain for women in the last twelve months. However, there isn’t much to celebrate as men lost 26,000 jobs last month.

How does this affect the recovery overall? Women still account for a disproportionately small share of the gains in the recovery – women have gained only 22.5 percent of the 2.5 million net jobs added to the economy since the recovery started in June 2009, even though they suffered 28.4 percent of the job loss in the recession (December 2007-June 2009). But losing jobs for men is no way to close the gap.

The bottom line is that we still have a long way to go for a full recovery for everyone.

Key facts from today’s data:

  • We need more jobs. Women have regained only about a quarter of the jobs they lost in the recession while men have regained just about a third. Overall we still have nearly five million fewer jobs now than we did when the recession began in December 2007.
  • We really, really, need more public sector jobs. The public sector lost 13,000 jobs last month (10,000 by men, 3,000 by women). For the recovery overall, public sector losses have hurt growth: the 601,000 jobs lost in the public sector have wiped out nearly 20 percent of private sector gains. For women public sector losses in the recovery have been even more painful; these losses have wiped out nearly 40 percent of their private sector gains.

    How Public Sector Job Loss is Hurting the Recovery (Graph)

  • Little changed with unemployment rates overall. Adult women’s unemployment rate stayed steady at 7.4 percent for the third month in a row, while adult men’s unemployment rate went up from last month, to 7.8 percent in May.
Read more...
Tags: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Jobs, Unemployment & UI, Unemployment, Employment | Add new comment

Raise the Minimum Wage and Narrow the Wage Gap

Posted by Abby Lane, Fellow | Posted on: May 31, 2012 at 10:47 am

There are currently two major pieces of legislation in Congress that would help close the wage gap. One is the Paycheck Fairness Act (PFA), which is scheduled for a vote soon. The PFA would strengthen current laws against wage discrimination by protecting employees who voluntarily share pay information with colleagues from retaliation, fully compensating victims of sex-based pay discrimination, empowering women and girls by strengthening their negotiation skills, and holding employers more accountable under the Equal Pay Act. The other is one that you might not think of: the Rebuild America Act, which would raise the federal minimum wage from just $7.25 per hour to $9.80 per hour, giving a raise to millions of women workers.

Each year, millions of workers struggle to make ends meet on minimum wage earnings. Roughly two-thirds of these workers are women. They provide care for children and elders, clean homes and offices, and wait tables.

Read more...
Tags: Equal Pay, Minimum Wage, Paycheck Fairness Act, Wage Gap, Equal Pay and the Wage Gap, Minimum Wage, Employment | 1 comment

Wall St. Journal: Unemployment Rate without Government Cuts – 7.1 Percent Instead of 8.1 Percent

Posted by Abby Lane, Fellow | Posted on: May 18, 2012 at 10:02 am

Justin Lahart from the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out the impact of the public sector job cuts on the unemployment rate. Guess what? It’s bad. Really bad.

Lahart wrote, “The unemployment rate would be far lower if it hadn’t been for those cuts: If there were as many people working in government as there were in December 2008, the unemployment rate in April would have been 7.1%, not 8.1%.”

An unemployment rate of 7.1 percent! Unemployment hasn’t been that low in nearly three and a half years.

Let’s take a look at his chart:

Government Cuts

Read more...
Tags: Unemployment, Poverty & Income Support | 1 comment

Who Needs Facts? We Do, Whatever the House GOP Leadership Thinks.

Posted by
Abby Lane, Fellow
Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst
| Posted on: May 15, 2012 at 12:34 pm

Did you know…

These facts aren’t trivia; they have important implications for public debate and public policy. And they all come from the American Community Survey (ACS) a dataset that almost all House Republicans and a handful of House Democrats voted to eliminate last week.  

The ACS is invaluable to researchers, businesses, non-profits and the government. The ACS is the only source of annual data on the social, economic, and demographic characteristics of our country down to the neighborhood level.

The arguments to eliminate the ACS are tenuous at best. Some policy makers, like Congressman Daniel Webster (R-FL), have stated that the survey is a violation of privacy. This is simply ludicrous – the Census Bureau takes extreme caution to make sure that all survey results are confidential. No one’s responses are identifiable – from looking at the public data, it is impossible to tell who answered a survey question a specific way.

Read more...
Tags: Census Bureau and Census Data, House of Representatives, Equal Pay and the Wage Gap, Data on Poverty & Income, Tax & Budget | Add new comment