Low-paying jobs are growing faster than decent-paying jobs, and more women than men are getting measly wages.
By
Republicans in the
Senate blocked a vote on the minimum wage earlier this month — no surprise
there. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee was the only Republican who stood aside.
But don’t believe the issue is dead. Democrats will make sure that raising the
minimum wage and reducing income inequality will be hot topics all the way to
Election Day.
President Barack Obama fired
the first shot when he used his State of the Union speech in January to
announce an increase from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour for federal contract workers.
Forcing GOP Senators to vote “no” for the rest of the country’s workers was
another volley.
But now things are
changing, according to news from the National Women’s Law Center. It’s one of
those good-and-bad news situations.
The good news? Unlike
men, women have actually regained more jobs than they lost in the recession.
Our unemployment rate for April dropped to 5.7 percent, from 6.2 percent in
March. The bad news is what we’re earning in those new gigs. Low-wage jobs are growing at a faster rate than
decent-paying jobs.
And here’s what
everyone should worry about — it’s a downward slide. About 40 percent of new
jobs created last year pay less than $14 an hour, twice the rate we saw before
the recession.
The researchers say
both women and men are being pushed into bottom-rung jobs. But since the great
majority of this lousy McWork is done by women, it’s a bigger problem for us
than it is for men.
We comprise half the
workforce overall, but have three-fourths of the low-wage jobs. Since the start
of the recession, over 35 percent of women’s job gains have been in low-wage
industries, like retail, fast food and housekeeping. Just 18 percent of men’s
new jobs were in those fields.
April’s figures show
that this imbalance is only getting worse — more than one in three of the new
jobs women secured were in these low-wage industries, as opposed to one in ten
for men.
That’s not all.
Not only are women
taking lower-paying jobs at a higher rate than men, we’re getting paid less for
that work. On average, women working the 10 lowest-paying fields make nearly 10
percent less than men working in the same fields, according to additional
National Women’s Law Center research. And the gap can’t be explained away by
taking into account any differences in the number of hours that women work
compared with men.
Clearly, the GOP’s
refusal to raise the minimum wage is just one more skirmish in the war on
women.
Martha Burk is the
director of the Corporate Accountability Project for the National Council of
Women’s Organizations (NCWO) and the author of the book Your Voice, Your Vote: The Savvy
Woman’s Guide to Power, Politics, and the Change We Need. Follow Martha on
twitter @MarthaBurk. Distributed via OtherWords (OtherWords.org)