Monica Potts talks about the Paycheck Fairness Act’s failure with an advocate from the ACLU.
The bill was designed to correct some of the problems with enforcement of the Equal Pay Act. Can you describe what those problems were, and how the bill would fix them?
The Paycheck Fairness Act would provide an update to the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which was a landmark employment-discrimination law, but it has not been able to achieve the problem of closing the wage gap, primarily because of limited enforcement rules. We wanted to implement some reforms that would modernize it and update it. Some of the major changes would be, for example, it requires employers to demonstrate, when there are wage differences, it must have a business justification that stems from factors other than sex. You can still pay people differently … but when the employer wants to use the defense that is the factor other than sex defense, it has to provide justification.
The second would have been to prohibit retaliation of workers who ask about their own wages or disclose their own wages. What’s important is that employers generally don’t have open pay policies. People don’t know what other workers are making, and they don’t know how to compare. It would not require them to disclose. There’s another very important part of the bill is that it would level the playing field to determine that women can [use] the same remedies as those who are discriminated against on the basis of race.
