Document 37: "Plank 10: Employment," from National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year, The Spirit of Houston: The First National Women's Conference (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), pp. 42-48.
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PLANK 10
EMPLOYMENT
The President and Congress should support a policy of full employment so that all women who are able and willing to work may do so.
The President should direct the vigorous and expeditious enforcement of all laws, executive orders and regulations prohibiting discrimination in employment, including discrimination in apprenticeship and construction.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission should receive the necessary funding and staff to process complaints and to carry out its duties speedily and effectively.
All enforcement agencies should follow the guidelines of the EEOC, which should be expanded to cover discrimination in job evaluation systems. These systems should be examined with the aim of eliminating biases that attach a low wage rate to "traditional" women's jobs. Federal legislation to provide equal pay for work of equal value should be enacted.
Congress should repeal the last sentence of Sec. 703(h) of Title 7, Civil Rights Act (1964) which limits enforcement of that law by incorporating the more restrictive standards of the Equal Pay Act.
As the largest single employer of women in the Nation, the President should require all Federal agencies to establish goals and timetables which require equitable representation of women at all management levels, and appropriate sanctions should be levied against heads of agencies that fail to demonstrate a "good faith" effort in achieving these goals and timetables.
The Civil Service Commission should require all Federal agencies to establish developmental and other programs in consonance with upward mobility and merit promotion principles to facilitate the movement of women from clerical to technical and professional series, and make all Federal women employees in Grades (GS) 11 through 15 eligible for managerial positions.
Agencies and organizations responsible for apprenticeship programs should be required to establish affirmative action goals and timetables for women of all racial and ethnic origins to enter into "non-traditional" training programs.
Federal laws prohibiting discrimination in employment should be extended to include the legislative branch of the Federal Government.
In addition to the Federal Government. State and local governments, public and private institutions, business, industry and unions should be encouraged to develop training programs for the employment and promotion of women in policy-level positions and professional, managerial and technical jobs.
Special attention should be given to the employment needs of minority women, especially blacks, Hispanics. Asian Americans and Native Americans, including their placement in managerial, professional, technical and white collar jobs. English-language training and employment programs should be developed to meet the needs of working women whose primary language is not English.
The Congress should amend the Veteran Preference Act of 1944 (58 Stat. 387, Chapter 287, Title 5, US Code) so that veterans preference is used on a one-time-only basis for initial employment and within a three-year period after discharge from military services, except for disabled veterans. It should modify the "rule of three" so that equally or better qualified non-veterans should not be unduly discriminated against in hiring.
Title 7 of the 1954 Civil Rights Act should be amended to prohibit discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions.
The President should take into account in appointments to the National Labor Relations Board and in seeking amendments to the National Labor Relations Act of 1936 the obstacles confronting women who seek to organize in traditionally nonunionized employment sections.
Unions and management should review the impact on women of all their practices and correct in justices to women.
Enforcement of the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Social Security Act as they apply to household workers and enforcement of the minimum wage should be improved.
Federal and State governments should promote Flexitime jobs, and pro-rated benefits should be provided for part-time workers.
All statistics collected by the Federal Government should be gathered and analyzed so that information concerning the impact of Federal programs on women and the participation of women in the administration of Federal programs can be assessed.
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Background:
"The trend toward women working outside the home began building in the 50's and exploding in the 70's. For the last couple of years, American women have been pouring into the nation's offices, stores, and factories…"
Women have always worked. No economy has ever been able to sustain itself on the work of men alone, and the United States is no exception. We began as a nation of farmers, skilled crafts and trades people, with men and women working to produce the goods and services needed to survive. Women wove cloth, made garments, candles and furniture, butchered and preserved food and often labored side by side with their husbands in the fields and in trade, while also bearing the responsibility for rearing children and keeping house. Women slaves worked as field hands and servants.
As the Industrial Revolution offered more free men a chance to work for wages outside home and farm, most women remained at home with the children and tasks that had not been industrialized. They were, of course, unpaid, and no monetary value has ever been attached to their indispensable labor in the home and family. But even in Colonial times, some women worked for money. The Declaration of Independence, for instance, was printed by Mary Goddard, a woman who ran a printing business in Baltimore.
Later, a rising proportion of women followed traditional women's work out of the home and into schools, hospitals, textile mills and clothing factories, canneries, retail stores and eventually into the clerical or "housekeeping" work of offices.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor Women's Bureau Handbook on Women Workers, "One of the most spectacular changes in the American economy in the past quarter century has been the dramatic increase in the number and proportion of women who work for pay outside the home. Over the last 25 years the number of women in the labor force more than doubled…."
By September 1977, 48.9 percent of women over age 16 were in the labor market, swelling their ranks to 40.5 million against 57.2 million men in the work force. They were 41 percent of the labor force.
"The trend toward women working outside the home began building in the 50's and exploding in the 70's," The New York Times reported November 19, 1977. "For the last couple of years, American women have been pouring into the nation's offices, stores and factories at rates surpassing all projections made by the Department of Labor."
The Woman's Bureau handbook pointed to a number of factors contributing to the growth of women in the labor force: "… the trend toward smaller numbers of children in families and a change in the pattern of spacing children; the large increase in the number of families headed by women; and the increase in the life expectancy of women. Other major factor are the rapid growth of white collar jobs in which women are primarily employed and the increase in part-time employment opportunities." It also noted that the particularly large increase in labor force participation by young married women with small children and the changing attitude toward careers for women outside the home.
The New York Times analysis cited inflationary pressures, "which gave rise to the two-paycheck family" and other economic, demographic, technological and social forces: "Women are marrying later, having fewer children, divorcing more often, living decades beyond the lifespans of their grandmothers. Hence, their work-life profiles are beginning to look more and more like those of men."
Accompanying the increase of women in the labor force has been their movement, albeit in very small numbers, into nontraditional jobs; they are going into the skilled trades, into bus and truck driving, into telephone repair work, into police and fire departments, into engineering, accounting, insurance and management, into the law and medicine.
But despite these breakthroughs and despite some highly publicized token "firsts" for women in traditionally male occupations, a majority of women workers remain clustered in retail, service, clerical and other low paying jobs, and even when they do the same work as men, they are often paid less. Women's average earnings continue to be much lower than those of men. In 1976, women who worked year round earned, on average, 60 percent of what male workers earned. This income gap has remained relatively unchanged for the past 20 years, according to the Labor Department. Industry saves billions of dollars each year by underpaying women.
For women who work, equality of the pay envelope and equality of job opportunities are still a long way off.
Full employment Unemployment has been higher for women than for men in 29 of the past 30 years. In 1977, three and a quarter million women were unemployed, or 8.2 percent, compared with 6.2 percent of men.
In November 1977, President Carter endorsed a modified version of the Humphrey-Hawkins full employment bill. In its original form, the bill would have provided jobs for all who are
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Full employment is important to millions of women who must work for a living, to millions more caught up in the poverty-welfare cycle, to millions of others who would enter the labor market if jobs were available.
Like minority workers, women are often the last hired and the first fired, and in periods of recession they are especially vulnerable to loss of jobs. During times of mass unemployment, women are forced to compete with men for the same jobs, and this has resulted at times in a backlash against the women's movement, against affirmative action programs and against other efforts by women to remedy economic inequities.
Despite the huge numbers of women who must support themselves and their families, women are still too often seen as working for "pin money" and they are expected to "go back home" when jobs are scarce. A national policy committed in word and deed to full employment is essential to women and men alike.
Laws Banning job discrimination Whether unemployment is high or low, most women are shortchanged in the job market. They are denied better paying jobs. They are denied so-called "male" jobs such as construction, which carry higher pay. They are denied promotions available to men. And in spite of laws to the contrary, they are still denied equal pay. Only a very few women have been able to force their employers to comply with laws prohibiting discrimination in employment.
Women have been discouraged from bringing charges of discrimination by cumbersome procedures, delays because of big backlogs of unsettled cases, fear of reprisal from their employers, costs of litigation, and court decisions that have supported flagrantly discriminatory practices of employers.
In testimony before the House Subcommittee on Employment Opportunities in October 1977, Assistant Secretary of Labor Donald Elisburg admitted that the system for monitoring affirmative action programs required of all Federal contractors "has quite simply not responded to the Department's policies and intentions." In August 1977, a Navy contractor lost all of its Federal contracts because of failure to develop an acceptable affirmative action program, but it was only the 13th contractor to be dropped since the program was created in 1965.
EEOC reorganization In June, 1977, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was coping with a backlog of 130,000 complaints under Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In February 1978, President Carter sent to Congress a sweeping plan to reorganize Federal enforcement of laws prohibiting employment discrimination, to cope with the backlog, and to keep up with new cases of discrimination. In addition to speedier processing of individual charges of discrimination. EEOC will undertake reviews of patterns and practices of employment that systematically keep women down. The plan consolidates within EEOC civil rights functions now dispersed in many Government agencies, providing a single civil rights agency for the Federal Government.
Pay discrimination is illegal under both the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which is part of the Fair Labor Standards Act enforced by the Department of Labor, and under Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, enforced by the EEOC. The reorganization plan transfers to the EEOC responsibility for enforcing both laws.
Title 7 is the broader statute. It prohibits discrimination in hiring, promotion, assignment, and all other terms and conditions of employment, including compensation of every kind. The Equal Pay Act is limited to discrimination in compensation, and it defines discrimination rather narrowly. It specifically permits differences in pay between men and women for work of "equal skill, effort, and responsibility" if they arise under a bona fide seniority plan. EEOC would be more free to attack discrimination in pay if it were not required to follow the restrictive definition of discrimination set forth in the Equal Pay Act.
With the reorganization, EEOC expects to investigate facts in discrimination charges by face to face conferences within 30 days after the filing of the complaint. A separate staff will be assigned to handle backlog cases. In seeking a budget supplement to implement the new procedures, EEOC Commissioner Eleanor Holmes Norton said she hoped "to eliminate the backlog in two years." The reorganization plan was to go into effect automatically within 60 days of its submission by the President unless rejected by either house of Congress.
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Government as employer As the largest single employer of women, the Federal Government should be a model, setting high standards for private employers to match. It has declared itself in favor of equal opportunity and merit promotion for its own employees for a century. Yet affirmative action guidelines of the U.S. Civil Service Commission are weaker than those imposed, at least in theory, on Federal contractors. Civil Service guidelines do not, for instance, require Federal agencies to assess disparities in their employment profiles, or to develop annual goals for eliminating them.
Apprenticeships Women have traditionally been excluded from apprenticeship programs that lead to high paying skilled work. Those few admitted have had to deal with harassment from male coworkers. Labor Department figures for 1976 show that of 11 million skilled blue collar workers, only 545,038 were women. In that same year, the percentage of women carpenters, electricians, painters, plumbers, machinists, mechanics and stationary engineers ranged from less than one percent to about three percent of the totals.
The Department of Labor has announced it will soon issue final regulations requiring contractors on Federal construction jobs to employ women at least 3.1 percent of the total hours after one year, 5 percent after two years, and 6.9 percent after three years—very modest goals indeed.
Congress as employer Congress exempted itself as an employer from the equal employment opportunity laws, and its own staff practices fall far short of compliance. In July 1977, the House Commission on Administrative Review found that male administrative assistants averaged $39,000 a year while women administrative assistants averaged $17,000. The Commission suggested setting up a grievance panel with power to recommend but not enforce changes.
More recently, the Senate passed a bill prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex, and the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee has developed guidelines for enforcement.
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Minority women Minority women, who experience the double discrimination of race and sex, are more apt to be in the labor force than white women, but they are almost twice as likely to be unemployed and to suffer more job loss when the economy is depressed.
Unemployment rates in 1977 averaged 14 percent for black
women aged 16 and over, compared with 8.2 percent for all women in this age
range, according to the Department of Labor reported entitled Employment and
Earnings. Another Department of Labor publication reports that the
unemployment rate for Hispanic women
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Minority women tend to work in the lower paid occupations because they have not had access to the training that would give them needed skills for higher paying white collar and professional jobs. The March 1977 figures for Hispanic women, for example, indicate that only 8.2 percent of Hispanic women were in professional and technical occupations compared with 15.5 percent of all women. More than one-fourth of all Hispanic women were factory and transport workers, compared with 15.4 percent of all women in March 1977.
Minority working women are also more apt to have small children, and to be the sole support of those children, making it imperative for them to have secure, well paying jobs, and access to child care services. (For more details, see background report on Minority Women plank.)
Veterans' preference By law, women have had severely limited access to service in the armed forces, and consequently, the provisions of the Veteran Preference Act make it harder for them to gain entry into better paying government jobs. They also are threatened with losing their jobs when veterans are protected during a cutback. Because of preferential treatment accorded them, veterans (98 percent of whom are male) are twice as likely to be employed by the Federal Government. Because of preference, veterans who constitute 20 percent of those eligible for managerial Federal posts accounted for 34 percent of those selected in 1974, compared with 41 percent of eligible women, of whom only 27 percent were selected.
President Carter's plan to reorganize the Civil Service Commission proposes to limit somewhat the preferential treatment accorded veterans, but women would continue to be at a considerable disadvantage in competing for Federal employment opportunities.
Pregnancy discrimination Congress is currently considering legislation that would make it illegal to exclude pregnancy from disability benefits for working women. The bill (S. 995) has passed the Senate; the House version (H.R. 6075) was reported out of the House committee on Education and Labor in March 1978, but an anti-abortion amendment was added to the bill, making it objectionable to most of its supporters.
Unions Women in clerical, operative, and service jobs who belong to unions earn a fifth to a fourth more money than non-union workers in their fields, according to an article by Virginia A. Bercquist in The Monthly Labor Review, October 1974, but the proportion is dropping because more women are going into unorganized white collar jobs. These women would profit if they were organized in unions.
Congress is considering labor reform legislation that will
make it easier for unions to organize and recruit new members. S. 1883
increases the penalties for employers who violate workers' rights to organize,
and speeds up handling of unfair labor practices and union election cases. It
assesses double back pay
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Women are underrepresented in union leadership. Although women make up 21.3 percent of overall union membership, membership reports of the unions show that women held only seven percent of union governing board posts in 1974, and these are primarily in lesser posts. No woman has ever served on the policy-making AFL-CIO executive council. The federation's departments as well as its standing committees, trades departments and regional offices are all headed by men. Even in unions with predominantly female membership, such as the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, no women are in the top leadership. Perhaps the best record on women is held by the unaffiliated United Auto Workers, which has a Women's Department, has women filling about 14 percent of its top local union offices, and has helped support the Coalition of Labor Union Women.
More women in top union posts would result in more active organizing drives that would benefit men as well as women, more union support for equal employment opportunity and more attention to the needs of women workers.
Household workers All but two percent of the several million household workers in the United States are women, the great majority of them members of minority groups. They are at the bottom of the income totem pole, without fringe benefits, promotions or vacations. Many are not getting the social security coverage required by law, or the legal minimum wage to which they have been entitled since May 1974.
Flexitime Many women accept lower wages, limited opportunities, and few fringe benefits in order to work part-time or at hours compatible with their home responsibilities.
New York State, pleased by successful experiments, has authorized each State agency to set up alternative work schedules. These include flexitime, under which an employee has leeway of arrival and departure time providing she puts in the required number of hours; compressed work weeks, in which a full week's work is done in four long days, leaving a long weekend; and permanent part-time jobs, convenient for mothers and older workers.
Current Federal policy permits Federal agencies to develop flexitime policies within the limits of existing law, which requires an eight-hour day and 40-hour workweek.
Legislation pending before Congress would set up a three-year test program to experiment with all forms of alternative work schedules. Under the proposed bill (H.R. 7814) each agency could create such experiments if it so desired. The Civil Service Commission would monitor these test results and report back to the President and Congress. The House Committee on Post Office and Civil Service has reported the bill out and a similar bill, (S. 517) has been introduced into the Senate, but no action has been taken.
Data on women Federal agencies are not now required to assess the impact of their programs on women or to publish information on how many women participate in policy-making decisions. Without such statistics, the progress of women cannot be charted, and finally assessed.
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