Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid tabled a vote on a bill to promote natural-gas and electric vehicles today in the hopes that a compromise with Republicans is close. That should give some hint that proceeding with the cloture votes on the Paycheck Fairness Act and the food-safety bill could be a bad sign. The Paycheck Fairness Act would make it easier for women to ensure they're receiving equal pay, and the food-safety bill would modernize the food-safety system and give the FDA more power to regulate, including the power to require food recalls. The argument from the GOP on both of these bills was that they were bad for business: paying women the same pay as men and ensuring food isn't infected with disease is, apparently, bad for the bottom line. The Paycheck Fairness Act failed to go to the floor because Sen. Olympia Snowe, who advocates thought they could win over, ultimately voted against cloture; but the food-safety bill is being debated now.
Local food advocates have long argued that the food-safety bill has problems, but voting against food safety is a tougher position to take than one that ensures women have all the information they need to advocate for their own fair pay. I suspect a lot of this has to do with who's gotten sick from bad food-safety policies -- it lets people yell Think of the Children! -- but we still haven't, as a country, quite gotten on board with the idea of women in the workplace. That women take off work to have children and, sometimes, to raise them, still seems like the natural order of things, and women taking a pay penalty as a result doesn't strike many as an egregious miscarriage of justice. That men don't take time off and suffer an analogous fatherhood penalty doesn't occur to the those who maintain the pay gap is a choice freely made by women.
-- Monica Potts
