Employment

California just enacted the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, joining New York and Hawaii as states that care for those who care for the vulnerable. Domestic workers are an important part of today’s work force. These workers – 95 percent of whom are women – care for the household, the children and grandparents, the sick and people with disabilities. In the words of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, they do “the work that makes all other work possible.” And yet, they are often paid very low wages, and work in difficult conditions.

After 7 years of advocacy and two vetoes, California’s domestic workers will finally receive a very important workplace protection: the right to overtime pay. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it can be for workers who spend all day taking care of children, the elderly and the infirm. The bill of rights is estimated to cover 200,000 California housekeepers, child-care providers, and caregivers. Read more »

Imagine that you’re a live-in housekeeper. One day, your employer asks you to sign an arbitration agreement – meaning that should any claims arise against your employer, they will be handled out of court. You sign. Later on, you accept a subpoena on behalf of your boss. He proceeds to beat you up. When you sue him, the court points to the arbitration agreement and tells you the matter must be worked out outside of court. Read more »

Census Bureau data released yesterday show that women continue to experience high rates of poverty and a nasty wage gap.

In 2012, the poverty rate for women was 14.5 percent, substantially higher than men’s rate of 11 percent. Nearly 17.8 million women lived in poverty last year.

Poverty rates were particularly high for families headed by single mothers – more than four in ten (40.9 percent) were poor. More than half (56.1 percent) of poor children lived in female-headed families in 2012.

The poverty rates for other vulnerable groups of women were also high: black women (25.1 percent), Hispanic women (24.8 percent), and women 65 and older living alone (18.9 percent).

The wage gap figures also paint a bleak picture for many women.

The cold hard facts are that women working full time, year round continue to be paid only 77 cents for every dollar paid to their male counterparts, and the numbers are far worse for women of color, at 64 cents for black women and 54 cents for Hispanic women.

With women as primary breadwinners in over 40% of families today, women and their families simply cannot afford to make do with less.

Read more »

Not too long ago, employers advertised for higher-paying jobs in a section of the newspaper labeled, “Help Wanted—Male.” When Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor graduated from law school, they got no job offers. And, in the more recent past, when Michele A. Roberts went to court as a public defender, she was often mistaken for someone charged with a crime, a mistake she attributes to her race and gender. Ms. Roberts is now a Partner at Skadden.

These attitudes about women in the workplace have not gone away. Their vestiges can be seen today in women’s continued lower pay for the same job; segregation into a set of jobs that are perceived as “women’s work,” the vast majority of which are low paying; and exclusion and underrepresentation of women in high-wage jobs. And that doesn’t even cover the severe penalty that mothers face in the workplace, simply for being mothers. Each of these factors depresses women’s wages, and each is linked to practices and policies that are woven into the fabric of the American workplace.

So it’s hard not to feel a little bewildered when discussions about the wage gap—which has stayed stagnant at 77 cents for over a decade—devolve into assertions that we should chalk it all up to women’s choices and go home. Read more »

77 cents on the dollar – does that have a familiar ring to you? You guessed it—it’s the amount that women working full time, year round typically made for every dollar that men made in 2012. It’s now been more than a decade with no progress on narrowing the wage gap. That means that American women have been working for over a decade without seeing the wage gap diminish. The wage gap typically cost women $11,608 in 2012. Based on the 2012 wage gap, over the course of a 40-year career a woman would lose $464,300.

The wage gap is even worse for women of color:

• In 2012, African-American women working full time, year round were typically paid only 64 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men.
• Hispanic women working full time, year round were typically paid only 54 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men.

Because of a new rule out today from the Department of Labor, home care workers will no longer be left out of the basic wage and hour protections guaranteed by the FLSA. Today’s rule extends wage and hour protections to all direct care workers employed by home care agencies and other third parties. This is excellent news, and it’s about time!

The exclusion of home care workers from the FLSA is emblematic of all that is wrong with the way our society values (or doesn’t value) women’s work. This 90% female workforce does vitally important work for their clients, such as bathing, clothing, and administering medication. Yet, this work – like work in many female-dominated jobs – is among the most poorest paid. Home care workers typically earn below $10 an hour.

In 1975, only one year after Congress extended the FLSA’s protections to domestic workers employed by individual households, the Department of Labor took these protections away from home care workers through an expansive reading of the “companionship” exemption. This interpretation was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007, and home care workers and their advocates have been clamoring for the rule released today ever since. Read more »

Tomorrow, the Census Bureau will release new data on poverty, income, and health insurance in the U.S. in 2012. As we get ready to crunch numbers, we thought it would be helpful to take a deeper look at what these numbers tell us – and don’t tell us – about the wage gap.

The typical American woman who works full time, year round was still paid only 77 cents for every dollar paid to her male counterpart in 2011. For women of color, the gaps are even larger. This blog post provides details about the wage gap measure that the Census Bureau and the National Women’s Law Center use, factors contributing to the wage gap, and how to shrink the gap.

What’s behind NWLC’s wage gap figure?

The wage gap figure that NWLC reports at the national level is the same as that reported by the Census Bureau – the median earnings of women full-time, year-round workers as a percentage of the median earnings of men full-time, year-round workers. Median earnings describe the earnings of a worker at the 50th percentile – right in the middle. Earnings include wages, salary, net self-employment income but not property income, government cash transfers or other cash income – so basically the money people see in their paychecks. Working full time is defined as working at least 35 hours a week and working year round means working at least 50 weeks during the last twelve months. Read more »

On Monday, the AFL-CIO added four very important words to their constitution: “gender identity” and “gender expression”. This change adds transgender individuals into the list of groups protected from discrimination in the union.

Groups like the Human Rights Campaign and the National Center for Transgender Equality are applauding the adoption of these new protections. “Labor has really been stepping up, and the AFL-CIO has been stepping up,” said Mara Keisling, executive director at the NCTE.

Keisling told Buzzfeed “One of the things I feel is really interesting about it is that words mean something. And the way this is worded, it really is why we do the antidiscrimination thing.” The amendment is called “Constitutional Amendment 9: Welcoming all Workers into our Movement.” Read more »

Each September the U.S. Census Bureau puts out information on the annual earnings of male and female workers. We’ll soon know the numbers for 2012, but we already know that in 2011, the most recent year for which data are available, women working full time, year round were typically paid just 77 cents for every dollar paid to their male counterparts – a loss of $11,084 in 2011. Read more »

For years, I’ve been enamored of the image of “Rosie the Riveter” – maybe it’s that we’re both redheads, but more likely it’s because she symbolize the breaking down of gender barriers, and new access for women to traditionally-male, higher-paying jobs.

That process of breaking down gender barriers is still very much in progress. Last week, the EEOC filed a lawsuit against Vamco Sheet Metals, Inc., a company that manufactures and installs sheet metal in New York. The lawsuit alleges that all of the women working on Vamco’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice construction project were fired for “pretextual reasons” – in other words, for fabricated or trumped-up charges designed to hide discriminatory sexist motive. And while Vamco has finished its work on this particular project, the EEOC is hoping to protect women who want to work on Vamco’s construction sites in the future with an injunction. Read more »