Equal Pay Act

United States 1963

Synopsis

The passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963 marked the federal government's legislative foray into safeguarding working women's employment rights. The law itself was weak: it mandated that women doing work "equal" (not "comparable") to men be paid the same as men. It permitted a gradual elimination of wage differentials between men and women and exempted entirely employers with fewer than 25 employees.

The nearly two-decade battle for equal-pay legislation is as important for how it brought together a small group of women active in government, liberal, religious, and labor organizations to advocate for gender equality as it is for the actual law passed. Where once these activists defended protective laws for women workers, after World War II they turned their attention to widening women's employment opportunity. This came about as American women began to think differently about their status in the workplace and at home in the postwar period. As demographic, economic, and technological transformations began to affect women's lives in the 1950s and early 1960s, women workers demanded equality with men in such areas as seniority, job assignment, promotion, and pay.

Women unionists were at the forefront of the equal-pay effort. The law's passage was one of several factors leading to the rise of second-wave feminism after 1965. Union women's experiences in helping pass the law helped create support for feminism in the labor movement.

Timeline

• 1944: Allies land at Normandy on 6 June, conducting the largest amphibious invasion in history.
• 1949: Soviets conduct their first successful atomic test. This heightens growing cold war tensions, not least because the sudden acquisition of nuclear capabilities suggests that American spies are passing secrets.
• 1954: The French military outpost at Dien Bien Phu falls to the communist Vietminh. France withdraws after decades of trying to suppress revolt; meanwhile, the United States pledges its support for the noncommunist government in the south.
• 1959: Two new leaders appear on the scene in January as General Charles de Gaulle becomes the first president of France's Fifth Republic, and Fidel Castro takes control of Cuba after the collapse of the corrupt Batista regime.
• 1962: Publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring heightens Americans' awareness of environmental issues.
• 1964: On 7 February, in the midst of both a literal and figurative winter in America following Kennedy's assassination, the Beatles arrive at New York's newly renamed JFK Airport. The enthusiasm that greets them is partly the result of a clever marketing campaign—one of the first of its kind—but it also has a great deal to do with the sheer talent and charm exerted by the four. In their 9 February Ed Sullivan Show performance, they break a record set seven years earlier by their idol Elvis Presley, with 70 million viewers, or roughly 60 percent of the U.S. audience.
• 1964: In Mississippi, civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Cheney are murdered. Twenty-one conspirators are arrested, and seven are convicted by a federal jury.
• 1964: U.S. Congress approves the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, giving President Johnson broad powers to prosecute the by now rapidly escalating war in Vietnam.
• 1967: The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band tops the list of releases for a year that will long be remembered as a high point of rock history. Among the other great musical events of the year are releases by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Doors, and Jefferson Airplane; also, the Monterey Pop Festival marks the debut of Hendrix and Janis Joplin.
• 1968: The Reverend Martin Luther King is assassinated on 4 April. Senator Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated on 6 June.
• 1969: On 20 July, assisted by pilot Michael Collins, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin become the first men to walk on the Moon.
• 1974: On 30 July, the House Judiciary Committee adopts three articles of impeachment for President Nixon, but rather than undergo a lengthy trial, Nixon on 8 August becomes the first president in U.S. history to resign. His successor, Gerald Ford, pardons him in September.
• 1979: After years of unrest, the shah of Iran leaves the country, and Islamic fundamentalist revolutionaries under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini take control. Later in the year, militants seize control of the U.S. embassy in Teheran and take more than 50 Americans hostage.

Event and Its Context

The Legacy of World War II

Support for a federal equal-pay law for women dates back to the nineteenth century but only took concrete form in the 1940s, as large numbers of women entering the war production workforce demanded that they be paid on a par with men. In general, they were not, but they did take up jobs previously designated as "men's jobs" and destabilized the notion that women were unfit to perform certain kinds of work. "Rosie the Riveter" came to expect more money and greater status in the workplace and union with this new responsibility. At the very least, "Rosies" everywhere wanted to be paid what men, working alongside them, were paid. Male unionists had long supported equal pay, especially in industries where the replacement of men with women loomed large. Some would come to seek an equal-pay law for reasons rooted in union and political principles.

The United Electrical Workers (UEW) was led by such unionists. Fearful of the influx of women workers into an industry already marked by low wages, piece work, and the threat of female substitution, union leaders demanded equal pay in contracts, government administration rulings, and the law. Equal pay had been a collective bargaining goal long before the country's entry into the war in 1941, but UEW officers stepped up their campaign by calling on the government to mandate equal pay through the War Labor Board (WLB). The WLB had issued "General Order no. 16" in 1942, mandating that companies with government contracts institute equal-pay policies. In a 1945 case that introduced the issue of comparable worth for the first time, the WLB ordered General Electric and Westinghouse to raise women workers' pay by four cents an hour and to set aside two cents per hour in a fund for upgrading jobs held by female employees. The war ended soon after the ruling, and the electrical manufacturers for the most part ignored it. As dramatically as they had come into the war plants, women left or, in most cases, were fired. Those fortunate enough to secure employment during the reconversion period took severe pay cuts: women who had earned an average of 85 to 90 cents an hour were now accepting jobs that paid only 45 to 50 cents an hour.

The Early Campaign for a Federal Equal Pay Law

Mary Anderson, the U.S. Women's Bureau director, crafted the first federal equal-pay bill in 1945, confident that the widespread support for equal pay during World War II would carry over into the postwar period. She called for nondiscrimination in wages paid for "comparable work" rather than "equal work." The Women's Bureau explored the possibility of what is now called "comparable worth" in a series of hearings and investigations held in 1945 and 1947. The bureau scuttled its incipient campaign in the face of contention over how best to develop evaluation schemes and job point weights in specific industries. Moreover, equal pay better "fit" the mood of the postwar United States. Equal pay promised individual justice, helped increase economic growth by putting more money in some women's pockets, and reduced potential workplace friction by maintaining occupational sex-segregation. This buttressed the male-defined, family-wage ideology, while comparable worth challenged accepted conventional notions of gender roles and industrial wage policy. Congressional bills continued to use comparable worth terminology, but most supporters quietly abandoned pushing for its application beyond that meaning work of an identical or nearly identical nature.

As reasonable as equal-pay legislation seemed, nearly 20 years passed before Anderson's proposal became law, and yet another decade went by before her call for "equal pay for comparable worth" gained significant support. Frieda Miller, Anderson's successor in the bureau, continued to work for equal pay into the 1950s. She was met, however, by opposition from the business community, conservative legislators, and a withering of public interest in rewarding women for their wartime contribution, an effort that faded from public memory as the nation moved into the 1950s.

Union support for equal-pay legislation came from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and its constituent unions, whose representatives testified before Congress that the bill's enactment was a matter of justice to women workers, beneficial to men, and necessary to the nation's well-being. These unions included the United Automobile Workers, United Rubber Workers, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and the Communications Workers of America. They viewed equal-pay legislation as a part of their "social union" mission to move beyond workplace issues and advocate for broad social change that valued human rights over property rights. Although social unionism receded in the face of modern business unionism in the 1950s, its rhetoric continued to embolden activists and some union leaders.

The other large labor federation of the period, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), was an organization dominated by skilled trade unions and had little interest in promoting "women's issues." In addition, the AFL objected to the legislation on the grounds that it opposed any schemes that involved the state in either evaluating job performance or setting wage rates. This hostility was rooted in the AFL's voluntaristic strategy, forged at the turn of the century by skilled trade unionists in reaction to debilitating court decisions and antiunion actions of state and federal politicians. Where the CIO saw its role in American society as wide-ranging and active in social reform, the AFL usually confined their efforts to agreements on such things as wages, hours, and training.

AFL leaders, in fact, were neither consistent nor unified in their approach to legislation. Their relationship to the state was both reactive and fluid, subject to change if circumstances warranted. In response to the debilitating effects of the Taft-Hartley Act, they began endorsing political candidates, usually Democrats. By the early 1950s, under the leadership of George Meany, the AFL was lobbying for further expansion of the Social Security program and an increased minimum wage. Shortly after the two federations merged in 1955, the AFL-CIO executive council formally endorsed equal-pay legislation. Thereafter, federation lobbyists Andrew Biemiller and George Riley worked with sympathetic lawmakers to generate interest in the bill.

The real force behind moving equal-pay legislation through Congress came from a loosely formed coalition sponsored by the U.S. Women's Bureau. The so-called Women's Bureau coalition had as its members unionists and those representing liberal interest groups, some of whom had their roots in the progressive movement. These groups included the Women's Trade Union League, the National Consumers League, and the League of Women Voters. Religion-based organizations and business and professional organizations participated as well, although in a less-concerted fashion. Unionists spearheaded most of the coalition's efforts. This included men, such as David Lasser of the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE). As head of the union's research department, Lasser conducted several important studies on equal pay and prepared the IUE's president, James Carey, to become a national advocate for the measure.

The campaign for equal pay languished for much of the 1950s. With the arrival of the Eisenhower administration in 1953, the executive branch's support cooled considerably. The new Women's Bureau director, Alice Leopold, angered equal-pay supporters by hinting that the bureau might soften its anti-Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) stance. She left union women and others on tenterhooks by occasionally stating that her office took no position against the amendment. Legislation backers believed that the ERA would negate protective laws for women workers and, perhaps, an equal-pay law. Although she did not abandon federal equal-pay legislation entirely, she failed to provide data on the prevalence of unequal pay scales, information many in Congress requested before backing the bill. More important, Leopold rejected federation overtures to back Edith Green's (D-OR) version of the original Anderson bill; she endorsed instead the conservative bill introduced into the House of Representatives by Frances P. Bolton (R-OH). Bolton's bill gave enforcement power to administrators in the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor to mediate disputes; they could not issue "cease and desist" orders, as Green authorized the Women's Bureau head to do in her bill. Also, while the Bolton bill provided for the secretary of labor to file suit on the complainants' behalf, it did not include a blacklist provision for guilty employers as did the Green measure.

For the first time, the center of support for equal pay shifted outside government and onto the National Committee on Equal Pay (NCEP), whose executive board was dominated by unionists. Although their support for equal pay never wavered, federation officers did not make the bill's passage a priority. Nor did unions. Most collective bargaining agreements did not reflect a commitment to equal pay: a Bureau of Labor Statistics study completed in the early 1950s found that only one-fifth of the 2,644 bargaining agreements analyzed contained equal-pay clauses.

Still, if Americans did not support equal pay with vigor during this period, they nevertheless were gradually more willing to accept the idea. Changing economic, social, and familial norms progressively destabilized gender relations in the two decades following the war's end. The massive layoffs and demotions of women workers in the 1945-1947 period gave way to a significant rise in the proportion and number of women in the paid labor force beginning in the late 1940s. While younger women starting families after World War II tended to stay at home, the percentage of mothers in the work force with children between the ages of six and seventeen shot up to 41.5 percent in 1963 from 30.3 percent in 1950, a 37 percent increase. As more women went on the payroll at factories, offices, retail stores, and schools, union activists conveyed the idea that working women's rights were a legitimate issue for public debate.

Passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963

Prospects for passage of an equal-pay law increased significantly following John F. Kennedy's election to the presidency in 1960. The new administration was not only more open to social legislation than the Republicans but included several unionists receptive to "women's issues." Key congressional figures marshaled support for the equal-pay struggle as well. Adam Clayton Powell (D-NY), who replaced the intractable Graham Barden (D-NC) as chair of the important House Education and Labor Committee in 1960, favored equal-pay legislation. Women legislators, in particular, played an important role in convincing colleagues to back equal-pay proposals. Veterans from both parties, such as Bolton, Katharine St. George (RNY), and Edna Kelly (D-NY), introduced and supported various bills, eventually backing Edith Green's effort.

Esther Peterson, more than anyone, revitalized interest in equal-pay legislation from her post as Women's Bureau head and assistant secretary of labor for President Kennedy. First as a lobbyist for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, then as the legislative representative of the AFL-CIO's Industrial Union Division (IUD), Peterson was a tenacious promoter of equal pay. She undertook equal-pay studies, urged congressional hearings, and convened meetings with union and NCEP members in her office, agreeing with those present to back the Green bill.

In the end, conservatives in Congress and the business community weakened the measure considerably. The act, modeled on the Fair Employment Standards Act coverage, exempted employers with fewer than 25 employees and permitted a gradual elimination of wage differentials between men and women workers. Unionists were particularly troubled by the replacement of "comparable worth" language with that of "equal work." Since the bill's inception in the mid-1940s, its advocates had insisted that "equal" would mean identical and that slight differences might be used by employers to justify disparate wages. They had long ago scotched the notion that "comparable" should address the relative aspects of positions based on skill, effort, and responsibility, but they still clung to the belief that retaining such language would prevent employer chiseling. Union leaders feared that managers would make minor changes in job elements in order to evade the law.

Labor representatives were in a weak position on this issue. Although they fought off the introduction of "equal" language into the bill, their fuzzy, narrowly construed notion of "comparable" said more about what they opposed than what they sought from legislators. In order to retain the "comparable" language, unionists had to acknowledge that they would have to make job comparisons at individual work sites; they balked, however, at the establishment of a job evaluation system, since it might strengthen management's already considerable control over employment matters. In the end, conservative lawmakers carried the day on the issue. Despite their misgivings in conceding to opponents on this matter, unionists and other NCEP members nevertheless honored Peterson's request to support the measure as being the only bill that had a chance of passage.

Labor leaders were able to intervene at key points to ward off some of the debilitating changes being made to the pending legislation. Unionists helped defeat an attempt by conservatives to include a provision in the bill postponing the effective date of the Equal Pay Act in the case of employees covered by current labor-management contracts until two years after enactment, or until contracts expired. They worried that such an allowance would set a dangerous precedent when they called for examining the minimum wage or maximum hours provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

In the wake of victory, women unionists assessed with pride their important role in the struggle. Activists viewed the act's passage as a confirmation of their place within the labor movement and in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Women were in the forefront of bringing the measure to Congress. They had definitively moved from the role traditionally assigned to them of providing auxiliary support to male unionists. Esther Peterson navigated treacherous political waters in convincing hesitant lawmakers that an equal-pay law was necessary. The struggle for a federal equal-pay law was an undertaking that union women would not let others forget during the height of second-wave feminism in the 1970s.

Those gathered in Washington, D.C., to celebrate on 11 June 1964—the date the Equal Pay Act was put into effect—understood the law's limitations but hoped it would serve as a symbolic victory for equality. In its first decade of enforcement, court decisions interpreted the meaning of "equal" pay broadly by refusing to limit the measure to identical jobs. As a result, the government awarded 171,000 employees $84 million in back pay.

The law was one of several signs in the early 1960s that support for gender equality in the workplace was on the rise. John F. Kennedy's President's Commission on the Status of Women, formed in the early 1960s, brought to national scrutiny for the first time the unresolved question of whether protective laws for women workers should be retained in the face of growing support for equality. In the years immediately preceding the emergence of second-wave feminism, new possibilities had begun to emerge, but they moved against the forces of tradition, industrial policy, and the law. Although the unionists and legislators who were most responsible for the Equal Pay Act of 1963 were not, at the time, in favor of jettisoning protective laws for women for the goal of workplace equality, the new law they helped create underscored a shift in working women's sentiment that would manifest itself over the course of the next decade in feminist activism.

Key Players

Anderson, Mary (1872-1964): As head of the U.S. Women's Bureau, Anderson crafted the first federal equal-pay bill in 1945. She called for nondiscrimination in wages paid for "comparable work" rather than merely "equal work."

Lasser, David (1902-1994): In his position as research director of the International Union of Electrical Workers, AFL-CIO, Lasser was a persistent advocate for equal-pay legislation. He conducted several studies on the matter and presented his prepared testimony to Congress in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Peterson, Esther (1906-1997): Peterson is considered by her peers and historians as being the most significant advocate for equal-pay legislation. She served as lobbyist for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, AFL-CIO, staff member of the Industrial Union Department, AFLCIO, and the director of the U.S. Women's Bureau in the Kennedy Administration.

See also: Equal Rights Amendment and Protective Legislation; Women in Industry Service.

Bibliography

Books

Deslippe, Dennis A. Rights, Not Roses: Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945-1980. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Cobble, Dorothy Sue. "Recapturing Working-Class Feminism: Union Women in the Postwar Era." In Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960, edited by Joanne Meyerowitz. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994.

Gabin, Nancy F. Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935-1975. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Harrison, Cynthia. On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women's Issues, 1945-1968. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Kessler-Harris, Alice. In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

—Dennis A. Deslippe