With Democrats in full-court press mode on “Equal Pay Day,” three Republican committee spokeswomen issued a memo pushing back on the liberal talking point, calling for “real solutions.”
“All Republicans support equal pay for equal work. And while we all know workplace discrimination still exists, we need real solutions that focus on job creation and opportunity for women. Not more regulations that cut flexibility and cut bonuses,” Kirsten Kukowski, RNC National Press Secretary, the NRCC’s Andrea Bozek, and Brook Hougesen of the NRSC wrote.
Tuesday — the day progressives have labeled “Equal Pay Day” to represent the amount of time it takes for women to make as much as men did the previous year — President Obama is scheduled to sign two new executive orders aimed at pushing pay equity among federal contractors. Democrats are also pushing the “Paycheck Fairness Act.”
Kukowski, Bozek, and Hougesen argue that the “Paycheck Fairness Act” — which would make it illegal for an employer to retaliate against an employee who seeks or discloses salary information and would require employers to disclose pay information to the government —- is a “desperate political ploy.”
“These are the same Democrats who controlled the White House and Senate for the last five years but always seem to wait for an election year to push another empty promise,” they wrote. “The truth is the ‘Paycheck Fairness Act’ is a desperate political ploy. And Democrats are cynically betting that Americans aren’t smart enough to know better. They’re forgetting the millions of women who belong to the Republican Party who will speak out. They’re missing the fathers, husbands, and sons who believe that women deserve real solutions.”
Meanwhile Tuesday morning, the White House issued a statement of policy strongly supporting the legislation.
“Today, women represent almost half of the workforce and, in many cases, are either the sole or primary source of income for their family,” the White House Office of Management and Budget wrote in a statement. “Despite their increased presence in the workforce and increasingly important role as family breadwinner, women continue to earn substantially less than their male counterparts, and the pay discrepancy is even more dire for women of color. The gender wage gap not only hurts working families, it also undermines the Administration’s commitment to expand opportunity for all Americans.”
The RNC women argued that, in fact, the legislation would not help women but rather hamper flexibility for working moms and end merit-based pay. Plus, it is already illegal to discriminate against people based on gender — equal pay for equal work have been the law since 1963.
“The ‘fix’ that Democrats propose, then, won’t change that. It would, however, tightly regulate how employers can pay their employees,” they wrote. “This law will not create ‘equal’ pay, but it will make it nearly impossible for employers to tie compensation to work quality, productivity and experience, reduce flexibility in the workplace, and make it far easier to file frivolous lawsuits that line the pockets of trial lawyers. Ultimately, this bill will hurt all workers, especially women.”
They further criticized the White House’s own pay disparity, explaining that the disparity reveals just how misleading the national 77 cents to a man’s dollar is. Indeed, when the same methodology is used on the White House staff list, women staffers make just 88 cents to the average male staffer’s dollar.
“When you use the similar methodology to evaluate White House salaries, it turns out that the median pay for women in the Obama White House is 88 cents for every dollar a man makes. When presented with this information, the White House says it’s not a fair calculation. You have to compare people in equal positions, they say,” they write. “Exactly! But their ‘77 cents’ statistic doesn’t do that. When you compare unequal work, of course you’ll come up with a statistic that shows unequal pay.”
According to the RNC, Democrats have turned to the pay gap because they are desperate and are trying to sell the legislation using “deliberate lies” because they cannot run on anything else.