Minnesota House passes bill to improve women’s economic security

The Minnesota House of Representatives passed the Women’s Economic Security Act, a compilation of more than a dozen bills designed to reduce specific types of discrimination and barriers that put women at an economic disadvantage on the job.

That’s especially relevant in Minnesota, where 80 percent of women work – a labor force participation rate that leads the nation.

The House vote came Wednesday, one day after the 51st anniversary of the federal Equal Pay Act, which is supposed to guarantee women equal pay for equal work. The Minnesota legislation does attack the fact that women still are paid significantly less than men.

But it also addresses other conditions that make it harder for women to succeed on the job, says Rep. Carly Melin, DFL-Hibbing, who is chief author of the legislation. And it’s not just a women’s issue.

Women are the primary earners in about half the state’s families, says Debra Fitzpatrick, director of the Center on Women and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute. “Here in Minnesota, more than anyplace else in the country, women are a critically important part of our prosperity and our productivity as a state.”

 “This is really about economic security for working families,” Melin said at a news conference before the vote. “In 2014, it’s long overdue that we really tackle this issue at the Capitol.”

The Women’s Economic Security Act:

• Fights the “motherhood penalty” by helping mothers stay in the workforce. It expands family leave and requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations for women who are pregnant or nursing,
• Expands the ability to use sick leave and other benefits for a variety of family caregiver situations and for victims of sexual violence,
• Expands access to high quality, affordable child care,
• Expands Minnesota’s pay equity laws beyond state and local governments: A new provision requires outside contractors who do at least $500,000 in state business also give their male and female employees equal pay for work of equal value,
• Makes it illegal for employers to retaliate against workers who discuss their pay with others,
• Provides economic and educational incentives to reduce “job clustering” and instead employ more women in higher-paying, “nontraditional” jobs; and
• Increases the possibility of retirement security by having the state explore running retirement savings plans for private-sector workers.

In addition, the Legislature expects to raise Minnesota’s minimum wage this week, which will especially help women, notes the Senate author, Sandy Pappas, DFL-St Paul. About 57 percent of the low-wage workers who will get a raise are women.

Pay gap is pervasive
When Congress passed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, women workers made only 59 cents for every $1 that men made. A half a century later, that pay gap is still huge: Women in full-time jobs still make about 20 percent less, and the gap is even larger in Greater Minnesota, Melin says.

The pay gap is pervasive: It exists for women who have college degrees as well as for women who don’t; it exists whether or not women have children; it increases with age; and it’s worse for women of color, according to research by the American Association of University Women. Over a lifetime, that gap costs the average woman nearly half a million dollars in lost wages, Fitzpatrick says.

Unions are one way women have erased the gender pay gap. Women in unions make more than men who are not in union jobs – an average of $67 dollars a week more, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Minnesota’s pay equity laws, which AFSCME helped pass and implement in the 1980s, have eliminated pay disparities in state and local government jobs.

For underpaid state workers, those “comparable worth” raises are worth about $5,000 more each year.

This article is reprinted from the AFSCME Council 5 website.