Wisconsin Repeals Equal Pay Law (Money More Important to Men)

[Milkster]

WASHINGTON -- A Wisconsin law that made it easier for victims of wage discrimination to have their day in court was repealed on Thursday, after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) quietly signed the bill.
The 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act was meant to deter employers from discriminating against certain groups by giving workers more avenues via which to press charges. Among other provisions, it allows individuals to plead their cases in the less costly, more accessible state circuit court system, rather than just in federal court.
In November, the state Senate approved SB 202, which rolled back this provision. On February, the Assembly did the same. Both were party-line votes in Republican-controlled chambers.
SB 202 was sent to Walker on March 29. He had, according to the state constitution, six days to act on the bill. The deadline was 5:00 p.m. on Thursday. The governor quietly signed the bill into law on Thursday, according to the Legislative Reference Bureau, and it is now called Act 219.
Walker's office did not return repeated requests for comment.
State Sen. Dave Hansen (D-Green Bay) and Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee), the authors of the Equal Pay Enforcement Act, criticized Walker on Thursday for not informing the public of his actions on SB 202.
“We are finally starting to see progress here in Wisconsin, yet like their counterparts across the country, Legislative Republicans want to turn back the clock on women’s rights in the workplace,” said Hansen.
Women earn 77 cents for every dollar that men make. In Wisconsin, it's 75 cents, according to the Wisconsin Alliance for Women’s Health (WAWH), which also estimates that families in the state "lose more than $4,000 per year due to unequal pay."
Business associations lobbied in support of SB 202, according to the state's Government Accountability Board. Groups like Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, and the Wisconsin Restaurant Association all backed a repeal.
Sara Finger, executive director of WAWH, said that the repeal was a "demoralizing attack on women’s rights, health, and wellbeing."
"Economic security is a women’s health issue," she said. "The salary women are paid directly affects the type and frequency of health care services they are able to access. At a time when women’s health services are becoming more expensive and harder to obtain, financial stability is essential to maintain steady access."
Walker is facing a recall election in June. The two frontrunners on the Democratic side who are competing to unseat him, former Dane County executive Kathleen Falk and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, sharply criticized the governor for allowing the repeal bill to become law.
Falk said Walker has "turned back the clock for women across Wisconsin."
"As a woman and as a mother who worked full-time while raising my son, I know first-hand how important pay equity and health care are to women across Wisconsin," she said in a statement to The Huffington Post.
A spokesman for Barrett's campaign said that Walker's "ideological civil war includes a war on women, and repeal today of this protection against pay discrimination is a major step backwards for Wisconsin values and basic fairness."
"Tom Barrett knows equal pay for equal work is essential, and failing to stand up for Wisconsin women in the workplace is yet another reason he [Walker] must be defeated this summer," he said.
UPDATE: 2:17 p.m. -- The Plum Line reports that President Barack Obama's campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith responded to Walker's repeal, calling on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, to take a position on the issue.
"As he campaigned across Wisconsin, Mitt Romney repeatedly praised Governor Scott Walker's leadership, calling him a 'hero' and 'a man of courage,'" she said. "But with his signing yesterday of a bill make it harder for women to enforce in court their right to equal pay, Walker showed how far Republicans are willing to go to undermine not only women's health care, but also their economic security. Does Romney think women should have ability to take their bosses to court to get the same pay as their male coworkers? Or does he stand with Governor Walker against this?"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1407329.html

[Milkster]

On Thursday, with little fanfare, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker signed a bill repealing the state’s 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act, which allowed victims of workplace discrimination to seek damages in state courts. In doing so, he demonstrated that our political battles over women’s rights aren’t just about sex and reproduction—they extend to every aspect of women’s lives.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/content...3765027365.jpg Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker speaks to an audience at a Waukesha County Republican dinner in Pewaukee, Wis., Saturday, March 31, 2012., Steven Senne / AP Photo
“This whole session has been anti-woman and anti-middle class, and this fits right in with that agenda,” says Wisconsin state representative Christine Sinicki, a Democrat who co-authored the original legislation.

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The Equal Pay law wasn’t just about women—it also offered protection from discrimination based on race, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, and other factors. But it was enacted largely in response to a large gap between men and women’s compensation, one that was worse than average in Wisconsin—in 2009 the state ranked 36th in the country in terms of workplace gender parity.

Wisconsin’s law was similar to many others—indeed, almost every state in the country has anti-discrimination laws that augment federal legislation. “It’s often easier, faster, and cheaper to pursue a claim of discrimination in state court than in federal court,” says Linda Meric, national director of 9to5, an organization devoted to working-women’s issues. “The law is different in each state, but Wisconsin was certainly in the mainstream in having a law that provided remedies for employees who experienced discrimination on the job.”

To bring a suit under the law, a plaintiff first had to go through a state-level administrative process to prove discrimination. It was rigorous enough that in the two years the law was in effect, not a single equal-pay lawsuit was filed. Still, the law’s supporters believe it has been effective in spurring businesses to pay women more fairly. Thus by 2010, the state had climbed to 24th in the national gender-parity rankings, with women making 78 percent as much as men, compared to 77 percent nationally. “Since the law was put into place, employers actually took notice and were very conscious of the fact that they had to follow this law or they were at risk of a lawsuit,” Sinicki argues.

For the law’s critics, though, even the threat of lawsuits put an intolerable burden on business. “If tomorrow you woke up and some policeman is at your door giving you a summons for something, the fact that you’re innocent wouldn’t make you happy, because you have to show you’re innocent at some considerable time and expense,” says Republican state senator Glenn Grothman, a major driver of the repeal.

Grothman says companies are being bombarded with false accusations of discrimination. “It’s an underreported problem, but a huge number of discrimination claims are baseless,” he says. “Most of them are filed by fired employees, and really today almost anybody is a protected class.” As a result, he says, many companies are forced to pay fired employees to go away. He argues that the Wisconsin law, which allowed for damages of up to $300,000, the same amount as in federal law, raised the cost of doing business in the state to intolerable levels. “It just puts Wisconsin way out of whack with other states,” he says. “I’m not sure there are any other states this bad off.”

Actually, there are—according to data from 9to5, 33 other states have either no cap on damages or the same $300,000 cap as Wisconsin. Still, even if the law isn’t an outlier, it’s not surprising that Grothman would see it as unjust, because he believes that the whole idea of pay discrimination against women is fraudulent.

Whatever gaps exist, he insists, stem from women’s decision to prioritize childrearing over their careers. “Take a hypothetical husband and wife who are both lawyers,” he says. “But the husband is working 50 or 60 hours a week, going all out, making 200 grand a year. The woman takes time off, raises kids, is not go go go. Now they’re 50 years old. The husband is making 200 grand a year, the woman is making 40 grand a year. It wasn’t discrimination. There was a different sense of urgency in each person.”

He continues, “What you’ve got to look at, and Ann Coulter has looked at this, is you have to break it down by married and unmarried. Once you break it down by married and unmarried, the differential disappears.”

In fact, despite Coulter’s well-known expertise in the field, this is incorrect. A 2007 study by the American Association of University Women found that college-educated women earn only 80 percent as much as similarly educated men a year after graduation. Part of that is attributable to differences in life choices and family circumstances, but not all. “After accounting for college major, occupation, industry, sector, hours worked, workplace flexibility, experience, educational attainment, enrollment status, GPA, institution selectivity, age, race/ethnicity, region, marital status, and number of children, a 5 percent difference in the earnings of male and female college graduates one year after graduation was still unexplained,” it said. After 10 years in the workforce, there’s an unexplained 12 percent gap.

“The idea that pay discrimination is a myth is a myth in and of itself,” says Fatima Goss Graves, vice president for education and employment at the National Women’s Law Center. “Study after study has shown the exact opposite.”

“What you’ve got to look at, and Ann Coulter has looked at this, is you have to break it down by married and unmarried. Once you make it down by married and unmarried, the differential disappears.”

Grothman doesn’t accept these studies. When I ran the numbers by him, he replied, “The American Association of University Women is a pretty liberal group.” Nor, he argued, does its conclusion take into account other factors, like “goals in life. You could argue that money is more important for men. I think a guy in their first job, maybe because they expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious. To attribute everything to a so-called bias in the workplace is just not true.”

Whatever you think of this perspective, it will now have a major impact on the futures of Wisconsin women. “Scott Walker and the Wisconsin state legislature are rolling back the clock on women’s rights, putting women’s economic security in greater jeopardy at the exact moment that they should be assisting women to get ahead in this tough economy,” says Meric.

As it happens, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus is from Wisconsin. He’s compared the notion of a war on women to a war on caterpillars. If he wants to know why some women have bought into this ostensibly preposterous idea, he might take a look at what’s going on at home.

Republicans have gone off the deep end.

[Ashmada]

So, this republican poltician wants all-male couples to earn more than heterosexual couples? Hmm...

[guartz]

Yep, women are gonna have to go back to giving head for bonuses and promotions... and it's all Walker's fault!

[Salodin]

Yep, women are gonna have to go back to giving head for bonuses and promotions... and it's all Walker's fault!

Fuckkk its so hard not to side with republicans on this one...

[Greatguardian]

How is this guy still in office? Or did the outrage just sort of quietly die down after a while?

[Headspace]

He's in process of being recalled.

Republicans are looking at entering fake democratic runners into the race. Seriously

[BaneTheBrawler]

Scott Walker being terrible. Nothing new here.

[Acturus]

Scott Walker being terrible. Nothing new here.

The whole thing is shitty, and will be shitty for years to come.

If Team Blue wins in the recall, they'll have to waste a bunch of time convincing the WI legislature to roll back all of these tea party provisions. Of course, Team Blue won't just do that, they'll slap riders on the new legislation cancelling Walker's footprint, which will send the legislature into deep discussion/arguing/political rallying all over again. Because WI seems to be predominantly Team Red, or at the very least, easily influenced by Team Red, any Team Blue initiative will hit a huge snag unless they muscle through it by also somehow getting a Blue supermajority in the legislature once Governer Blue is elected.

Either way, Walker, combined with the Team Red legislature, has fucked up Wisconsin for a very long time because of this.

Really, the only way to conceivably fix this quicker is to hope that these laws can be challenged and defeated in court.

[RKenshin]

How could any politician think this was any kind of a good idea to do, by Republicans no less, when the political atmosphere is full of 'Republicans are anti-woman!' rhetoric already?

Are we all being trolled or something? Do they want to lose re-elections?

[Talint]

How could any politician think this was any kind of a good idea to do, by Republicans no less, when the political atmosphere is full of 'Republicans are anti-woman!' rhetoric already?

Are we all being trolled or something? Do they want to lose re-elections?

Walker may see the writing on the wall, and has opted to try and cram through as much legislation as possible while they still can.

It's pretty easy math. Obama on the ticket combined with a highly contentious recall effort means that his days are likely numbered.

Reminds me of that SNL sketch with Farley impersonating Newt as Speaker for the first time, and they can't spout of legislation fast enough to get passed.

[archibaldcrane]

How could any politician think this was any kind of a good idea to do, by Republicans no less, when the political atmosphere is full of 'Republicans are anti-woman!' rhetoric already?

Are we all being trolled or something? Do they want to lose re-elections?

I don't get it either, there has to be some sort of strategy here, but... women are half of the voters... i don't get how being the anti-women party will fly.

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