Transcript for the Piece Audio version of STOP MISTREATING WORKING WOMEN!

Although the global recession has had a serious impact on working men and women alike, two new reports make clear that women in the United States and throughout
The world have suffered most because of long-standing discrimination.

The findings come from the United Nations’ International Labor Office … the ILO … and the New Center for American Progress … CAP … headed by John Podesta, former chief of staff for President Clinton.

The reports show that, above all, there ‘s a critical need to combat the worldwide mistreatment of working women … especially in these times of economic distress.

As the CAP report says, most of the jobs lost in the recession have been lost by men. Which has left millions of women to support their families. That’s a rough task for many women. For though they’re using doing essentially the same work as men, or the equivalent of it, women earn a lot less than men.

Internationally, women earn 30 to 40 percent less than men … that’s right, 30 to 40 percent less than men. The pay gap is narrower in the U.S. But even so, U.S. women average only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men.

The pay gaps exist in part because women take low-paying jobs because no higher-paying jobs are available to them or because they need jobs that allow them to balance work and family obligations. Men rarely have that problem.

What’s needed everywhere, of course, is equal treatment for working women. That is, paying women the same as men doing comparable work and otherwise treating women the same as men.

In the U.S., that woul d mean cracking down on the widespread violations of the 47-year-old Equal Pay Act that has never delivered on its promise to guarantee women equal treatment on the job.
Better yet would be the passage … and strict enforcement … of the long stalled Paycheck Fairness Act. It would close loopholes in the Equal Pay Act that have made it relatively easy for employers to discriminate against women in pay and other matters.

The CAP report says probably the most essential reform aside from paycheck fairness would be worldwide updating of basic labor standards in order to recognize that most workers have family responsibilities and need predictable and flexible work schedules … family and medical leaves … and paid sick days.

That would assure that women who stay on the job in order to support their families won’t end up jobless because of “family-work conflicts.”

At least in the United States, those and other reforms would likely win broad public support. A recent poll cited in the CAP report showed that “a large majority of Americans support new, more family-friendly workplace policies.” Eighty-five percent said businesses that fail to adopt to family needs risk losing good workers.

And businesses that fail to adapt will be furthering the mistreatment of working women that has gone virtually unchecked for far, far too many years. No matter what the recession or its end brings, we will not have a truly healthy economy until working women are finally guaranteed all of their employment rights.

This is Dick Meister.