Free Republic

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) says women “pay more for everything.” “For we women, it costs more to be a woman. We pay more for everything,” Mikulski said during a rally for the Paycheck Fairness Act. “We continue to have to fight the battle of more expensive, medical care, child care, even dry cleaning. They charge us more to do our blouses than guy’s shirts. We women are tired of being taken to the cleaners. Pass Paycheck Fairness,” Mikulski said. …

President Obama and his aides are up to their usual deeply unpresidential vitriol, suggesting evil motives on the part of Republicans for opposing Obama’s agenda. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney today compared Republican opponents of the Paycheck Fairness Act to “conservatives” who fought civil rights legislation. Carney spoke today at the White House briefing: "Republicans object to this strenuously using the same arguments that conservatives used when they objected to very bit of progress made on civil rights for women and minorities over the past many decades. And they were wrong then, and they are wrong now." Actually, Republicans...

Now that the midterm elections are over and a lame duck session of Congress has convened, the Democrats in charge can take a deep breath, put aside all the campaign rhetoric and get back to doing what they do best: destroying jobs. Sitting on Harry Reid’s desk is a little-noticed economic hand grenade with its pin half-pulled called the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill that has already passed the House and might well pass the Senate if Reid can put down a Republican filibuster. Dirty Harry has to be feeling lucky these days, having won reelection by a comfortable margin,...

Senate Republicans have succeeded in blocking a measure designed to reduce wage disparities between men and women. The 58-41 vote to take up the Paycheck Fairness Act fell short of the 60 needed to overcome GOP opposition. Civil rights groups, labor leaders and the Obama administration all supported the bill, which would make employers prove that any disparities in wages are job-related and not sex-based.

Women didn't vote for Democratic candidates in the November election in the numbers expected, so President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid want to woo them back into the fold by passing the Paycheck Fairness Act (PFA) in the lame duck session. We don't need this: It's a job killer, not a job creator. The Paycheck Fairness Act (S.3772) would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Those laws have produced fair results for many years. Under current law, Title VII entitles an employee to win back pay if the...

If you would understand why America has lost the dynamism she had in the 1950s and 1960s, consider the new Paycheck Fairness Act passed by the House 256 to 162. The need for such a law, writes Valerie Jarrett, the ranking woman in Barack Obama's White House, is that "working women are still paid only 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man." But why is that a concern of the U.S. government, and where is the empirical evidence that an inequality of pay between the sexes is proof of sexist hostility to women? On average, Asians earn more...

America first put an equal-pay law on the books in 1963, when women earned 59 cents for every dollar earned by a man. While this legislation was landmark at the time, its core provisions require updating if it is to fulfill its promise. Nearly 50 years later, the wage gap has narrowed by only 18 cents. Despite news reports that the gap narrowed in the last year, the census report released Thursday showed otherwise. Working women are still paid only 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man -- and are paid less than men even when they have...

AMONG the top items left on the Senate’s to-do list before the November elections is a “paycheck fairness” bill, which would make it easier for women to file class-action, punitive-damages suits against employers they accuse of sex-based pay discrimination. The bill’s passage is hardly certain, but it has received strong support from women’s rights groups, professional organizations and even President Obama, who has called it “a common-sense bill.” But the bill isn’t as commonsensical as it might seem. It overlooks mountains of research showing that discrimination plays little role in pay disparities between men and women, and it threatens to...

The Obama administration is backing legislation that includes regulations requiring U.S. businesses to provide to the government data about employee pay as it relates to the sex, race and national origin of employees. In an orchestrated effort that included a statement by President Barack Obama and an event at the White House featuring Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Eric Holder and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, the president and his cabinet endorsed the Paycheck Fairness Act. The House approved the act in 2009, but the Senate did not approve it. In the 111th Congress, both the House and the Senate...

... Two pay discrimination bills on the House floor Friday could be among the first that labor-friendly Barack Obama signs into law when he becomes president later this month. ... Last year, President George W. Bush threatened to veto both the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which would overturn a 2007 Supreme Court decision making it more difficult to sue over past pay discrimination, and the Paycheck Fairness Act, which closes loopholes allowing employers to get around the 1963 law requiring equal pay for equal work. The bill the House is considering would clarify that each paycheck resulting from discrimination...