Date: 1982-07-14
Speaker: WILLIAM J. COYNE (democrat)
Chamber: H

Madam Speaker. I rise in strong support of the equal rights amendment. In doing so. I stand with the two out of every three Americans who favor this most important civil rights measure. What we reintroduce here today as an amendment to the U.S. Constitution will be much debated. In this round of the debate. I hope that proponents and opponeats alike will concentrate on the real issue ERA addresseseconomic discrimination on the basis of sex. Opponents of ERA confuse the argument by contending that the ERA is a social issue. and a social issue alonea matter of determining how one section of society relates to another. But we should remember that it is the perpetuation of economic inequality by reason of sex that is the underpinning of those relationships. Some of those who helped defeat ERA in the first roundand I emphasize that it was only the first roundappear unaware of the facts of life in 1982 America. They offer a rather udd. anachronistic view of womens place in our Nationseen but not heard. preoccupied with household chores to the exclusion of nearly all else. unwilling to bear the burdens of men. Let us look at the world as it is. not as some people wish it to be. In 1980. 60 percent of women 16 to 64 were working for pay. The 44.6 million women workers comprise 42.6 percent of the work force. They include single women as well as mothers. In 1981. for example. 31.8 million children. or 54 percent of all children. had mothers in the labor force. In the last decade. women accounted for nearly 60 percent of the increase in the civilian labor forceroughly 13 million women compared to more than 9 million men. As the numbers grow. the pay and status of women do not. Inadequate protections against sexual discrimination allow employers. in some instances. to hire women as a "cheaper pair of hands" with little fear of legal reprisal. This contributes to some rather irrational use of job skills. According to the National Commission on Working Women: In 1979. fulltime women workers who were high school graduates earned less on the average than male workers who had not completed elementary school. Women workers who had graduated from college earned less than men workers with an eighth grade education. The situation is not improving. Today a woman can expect to make only 59.6.cents for every dollar a man makes. Women were arguably better off in 1955. 1 would like to share some statistics which show a rather distrubIng trend: Annual earrings Womens earnmgs as Women Men mens 1955 .................. . 2.119 $4.252 639 1960 ................... ............... J29"3 5.411 60.8 1965 .......................... 3.823 6.375 60.0 19 0 ................... ............... 5.323 8.966 59.4 1975 .................... 7.504 12.758 58.8 1919 ............... ....... ............... 10168 11.062 59.6 Source national commissin on working women Another shocking statistic which makes clear that women bear the brunt of economic discriminAtion is this seventyfive percent of all people living in poverty are women. This is all the more ironic when we consider the role women play in lifting families out of poverty. According to the Department of Labor: It is frequently the wifes earnings which raise a family out of poverty. In husbandwife families in 1979. 14.8 per cent. were poor when the wife did not work. 3.8 per cent when she was in the labor force. Of all wives who worked in 1979. the median contribution was more than onefourth of the total family income. Among those who worked year round full time. it was nearly twofifths. Among black families. the median contribution of working wives was one third of the total family income. The labor force participation of married women has almost tripled. from 17 percent in 1940 to 47 percent in 1977. Married women now. number almost 25 million persons and account for nearly 25 percent of the paid labor force. up from 9 percent in 1940. We need a strong ERA to protect the rights of the millions of women in the workplace. We also need an ERA to insure that women receive the full benefits of Government programs which theoretically treat all equally. but in practice evidence major discrimination against women. Let us consider our social security system. the subject of much discussion during budget debates. but generally ignored at other times. In 1980. 35 million social security beneficiaries received $120 billion in benefits. About 52 percent of those beneficiaries were adult women. The social security system touches the lives of 90 percent of the 100 million or so workers in paid employment aged 16 or older. 40 percent of whom are women. Under existing law. the benefit paid to the dependent spouse of a worker insured for benefits is 50 percent of the benefit paid to the retired worker. This law was enacted in 1939. It reflected the typical family role of that time of the husband being the sole source of family income while the wife was a homemaker. It also reflected the presumption that most marriages would be lifelong. Things are often very different today. In private pensions. women fare little better. A 1972 study showed that 49 percent of men. but only 21 percent of women employed in the private sector were covered by a pension plan on their longest job. Those covered were not assured that they would receive a pension at retirement. Pension plans usually require 10 years of participation before an employee acquires a substantial interest in his or her pension credits. This is of particular concern to women. since many do not work long enough in one job to acquire a vested interest in their pension credits. Moreover. women tend to work more frequently for employers who do not have plans. and tend to work part time or part year more often than men do. In the area of Government service. it is worth noting that the average male annuitant on the civil service retirement rolls as of September 30. 1978. received a monthly benefit of $903 while the average female annuitant received a monthly benefit of $606. Women tend to have lower earnings and shorter attachment to the Federal work force than men. Mr. Speaker. enactment of the ERA will not bring about an immediate end to the economic inequities women face. Without it. however. we can be assured that the women of the next generation will face many of the problems faced by. women of this generation. We cannotrely on a hodgepodge of various State ERAsand Pennsylvania has a good oneto remedy the economic injustice that is truly national in scope. My colleague from Maryland. Representative BAnBARA MIKUsKI. has likened this route to "freeing the slaves one plantation at a time." Those State amendments would not address the Federal problems I outlined earlier. Nor does Federal legislation such as the Equal Pay Act and title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. and Executive Order No. 11246. which deals with Federal contract compliance. cover employees of the U.S. Congress or of elected officialsemployees which certainly deserve the full protection of civil rights guarantees. IH 4084 We need ERA. It is a basic economic issue that relates to womens jobs. pensions. wages. social security. education. and many other areas. As long as injustice continues. there will be a campaign to bring about change. There is no time limit on equality.e