April 5, 2017
Page 7
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O PINION
A New Fix to Close the Gender Pay Gap
Don’t peg new
wages to old ones
m artha b urk
Tuesday, April 4
was Equal Pay Day.
Never heard of it?
If you’re a working
woman or someone
who cares about the
working women in your life, you need
to study up.
Equal Pay Day is the day in any
given year when women working full-
time, year-round catch up to men’s
earnings from the previous year.
Let’s say the average man made
$35,000 last year, from Jan. 1 to Dec.
31. The average woman working the
same amount of time made $27,300. It
will take her until April 4 of this year to
amass the same earnings the guy made
by the end of last year. So Equal Pay
Day is April 4 this year.
But there’s more.
Broken down by race, African-Amer-
ican women won’t meet the benchmark
by
until August. Native American women
must wait until September. And Latino
women will lag even further — until
November.
Pay discrimination based on sex has
been illegal since the Equal Pay Act
was passed way back in 1963. Still,
the pay gap remains at 22 cents on the
dollar for full-time, year-round work,
and it hasn’t moved in over a decade.
At that pace the gap won’t close un-
til 2059, according to the Institute for
Women’s Policy Research.
Meanwhile, employers who dis-
criminate against their women workers
can just sit back and dare them to sue.
Go ahead and hire a lawyer, the bullies
seem to say. Drag us through the courts
for a dozen years — if we don’t fire
you first. (Retaliation is illegal too, but
who’s watching?)
There are a number of reasons for
the pay gap that don’t have anything
to do with qualifications or education.
One is historical discrimination.
For most of our history, it was le-
gal to pay women less for the same
job — employers were even allowed
to advertise that fact. Another reason
is that employers historically under-
value “women’s jobs,” like providing
day care and nursing, as compared to
“men’s jobs,” like dog pound attending
and auto repair.
Another problem is lack of transpar-
ency. Employers aren’t required to dis-
close their workers’ pay, and in many
workplaces it’s against the rules to talk
about it with co-workers. So wom-
en can’t find out what they’re making
compared to men on the same job.
But in a bizarre twist on the “don’t
ask, don’t tell” rules that shield em-
ployers, it’s customary for companies
to ask for salary history and use that
information to set wages for new hires.
For job seekers who’ve been earning
less than their counterparts and working
below market rates — primarily wom-
en — pegging new wages to old ones
maintains the discriminatory practice.
Wage gaps that begin early can follow
workers all their working lives.
There’s a growing bipartisan con-
sensus that a simple change in the hir-
ing process — prohibiting employers
from asking job seekers how much
they’re currently paid — can make a
real difference in closing the gender
wage gap. Instead, salary offers should
be based on the market value of the po-
sition and the candidate’s credentials,
not their current salary.
To date, two states (Massachusetts
and New York) and four cities (New
York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and
Pittsburgh) have passed legislation
along these lines. The bills differ in that
some apply only to public employers in
the jurisdiction, while others apply to
all employers, public and private.
With no prospects in sight for the
federal government to do anything to
close the gender pay gap, innovation
by states and cities is welcome news.
If more follow suit, maybe we won’t
have to wait until 2059 to finally stop
marking (Un)Equal Pay Day.
Martha Burk is the director of the
Corporate Accountability Project for
the National Council of Women’s Or-
ganizations and the author of the book
Your Voice, Your Vote. Distributed by
OtherWords.org.
Support for the Creation of a Public Bank
Embracing socially
responsible values
J ustin a. e lardo
Mayor Wheeler recently announced
that the city of Portland, in protest of
Wells Fargo’s financial involvement
with the Dakota Access Pipeline, will
pursue other, more socially respon-
sible, banking alternatives. While a
number of local alternatives might fit
the mayor’s criteria for social respon-
sibility, there is another solution that
the city of Portland could pursue, the
creation of its own Public Bank.
To the uninitiated the concept of a
public bank sometimes creates con-
cerns that the government intends on
getting into the business of banking.
Those concerns are misplaced. The
term public, in public banking, is a
statement of whom the bank will be
serving, not who will be responsible
for operating the public bank.
Today, in the United States, the
state of North Dakota has its own pub-
lic bank. The Bank of North Dakota
(BND) is a privately run, for profit,
financial institution that has been in
operation since 1919. The state utilizes
the homegrown institution for its bank-
ing needs and, in turn, the public bank
by
engages in borrowing and lending
practices designed to promote econom-
ic benefits within the state of North Da-
kota. The BND mission also explicitly
prohibits the bank from being harmful
to other financial institutions operating
with the state.
One way in which the public bank
fulfills its mission is by financing state
infrastructure projects. Rather than uti-
lizing a Wall Street bank to underwrite
projects, North Dakota borrows di-
rectly from the Bank of North Dakota
with the BND collecting interest on the
loans. After deducting operating ex-
penses and profit, the public bank then
returns a portion of the interest income
back to North Dakota State Treasury. In
effect, the public bank allows the state
to borrow at very low interest rates.
Imagine a banking structure in Port-
land that is similar to the Bank of North
Dakota. The mission of a Portland
Public Bank could be designed to en-
courage the socially responsible values
that Portlanders hold so dear.
There are several areas in which a
public bank in Portland could deploy
financial capital. A Bank of Portland
could provide the city with low cost/
low interest loans for things such as
local infrastructure (roads). Taken
further, a Bank of Portland could also
encourage socially responsible lend-
ing within our community by lending
for the construction of low-income
housing and/or environmentally con-
scious construction projects, support
for local community development
banks, as well as bond financing for
Portland Public Schools and so much
more. The possibilities are abundant
and real.
Thankfully the notion of Bank of
Portland is not a pie-in-the-sky fairy
tale. Right now there is an organization
known as the Portland Public Banking
Alliance (PPBA) that is advocating for
the city to join a growing nationwide
movement and create its own public
bank. Currently the group is trying to
convince the city to finance a feasibil-
ity study. If interested please consider
contacting the organization, Mayor
Wheeler’s office, Portland Treasurer
Jennifer Cooperman, as well as the in-
dividual members of the Portland City
Council.
Justin A. Elardo is an economics
instructor at Portland Community
College.
The Law Offices of
Patrick John Sweeney, P.C.
Patrick John Sweeney
Attorney at Law
1549 SE Ladd, Portland, Oregon
Portland: (503) 244-2080
Hillsboro: (503) 244-2081
Facsimile: (503) 244-2084
Email:
Sweeney@PDXLawyer.com