It is with his knowledge and at his request that I, as Director of the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor, am preceding him in the order of witnesses this morning.

I am very glad, both officially and personally, to appear before this committee to again support, as I have been supporting for many years, the principle of equal pay for equal work for women, and, on this occasion, the specific provisions of H. R. 1584 and H. R. 2438, the Women's Equal Pay Act of 1949. I am extremely gratified that your committee is now giving active consideration to this important piece of proposed Federal legislation, which in substance has been submitted for consideration to two earlier sessions of the Congress.

One of the major interests of the Women's Bureau, since its establishment in 1920, has been the promotion of fair wage practices for women, including the elimination of wage differentials based on sex. During both world wars, the Bureau actively cooperated with employers, workers, and Government agencies concerned with the removal of wage differentials as a means of furthering the war effort. Attainment of our present national peacetime objective-an economy based on full production-is likewise dependent on the optimum use of womanpower in industry. The optimum use of that womanpower will not be achieved until the millions of women who are now an accepted and needed part of our labor market are assured fair treatment in the matter of their wages.

1. BASIC PROVISIONS OF H. R. 1584 AND H. R. 2438

H. R. 1584 and H. R. 2438 are essentially similar in approach and method to the bills under consideration by the Seventy-ninth Congress in 1945 and the Eightieth Congress in 1948. They do, however, take into account certain objections raised against those bills, particularly with reference to one of the tests of "comparable work," and to the use of industry committees. These provisions, which appeared in earlier versions of equal pay bills, have been eliminated from H. R. 1584 and H. R. 2438 and I believe their elimination will make this bill more workable.

I shall not review all the provisions of the bills, nor shall I expand on the harmful economic and social effects of wage discrimination against women, and the consequent need for Federal legislation. Other witnesses will have discussed these harmful effects and the need for a remedy in considerable detail. I, myself, have gone into these matters at length at congressional hearings in 1945 and 1948 and I am attaching copies of my previous testimony to this statement for the convenience of committee members who may wish to review those earlier statements. Insofar as those statements deal with particulars of earlier versions of the bills, they are no longer pertinent, but material on the effects of unequal pay on the economy and the need for legislation are still pertinent because the basic situation has not changed substantially.

(The statements referred to appear at the close of witness' testimony.)

I wish today, however, to concentrate my remarks on certain portions of the current bills, H. R. 1584 and H. R. 2438, which relate to the standards and guides for the administration and enforcement of an equal pay law.

The basic proposal of these bills is to identify as an unfair labor practice discrimination in the payment of wages between the sexes by

the payment of wages to any female employee at a rate less than the rate paid to male employees

for work of comparable character on jobs the performance of which requires comparable skills, except where such payment is made pursuant to a seniority or merit increase system which does not discriminate on the basis of sex.

The bills, further, make it an unfair labor practice

to lay off or discharge or in any other manner discriminate against any employee because such employee has filed any charges or instituted or caused to be instituted any proceeding under or related to this Act, or has testified or in about to testify in any such proceeding.

This section, section 2, is the heart of the proposal. The prohibitions of this section are to apply to employers of eight or more within the area of Federal legislative jurisdiction, as stated in section 6; responsibility for administration is placed in the Secretary of Labor, section 3; and his powers with reference to its enforcement are set out in sections 4, 5, and 6. Section 6 also provides for court review of the Secretary's orders, and for appeal to the courts by any aggrieved party. Section 7 and 8 relate to penalties for violation of the act and section 9 consists of definitions of terms used; section 10 is a separability clause.

2. BASIC CONCEPTS

The crux of the administrative problem is the interpretation of the provisions of section 2. Without presuming to go into legalistic detail, or to predict what interpretation the courts might give to specific words, I should like to point out the basic concepts of the sponsors and supporters of this legislation.

There still exists a multitude of prejudices, assumptions, and confusions with reference both to women's work and their skills, and to what an equal-pay law would do in relation to the situations the act would authorize the Secretary of Labor to deal with. Based on practices established years ago, when women were first coming into the industrial-labor market in considerable numbers, chiefly for the lowest-paying jobs, a tradition grew up among us that women were inferior workers, were not worth as much as men to an employer, were working only for pin money and for short periods until they could happily get married and have a man working for them.

Events and experiences, especially since World War I, have developed a much expanded recognition of women's high industrial skills, their ability to respond to training when it is made available, their permanent place in the labor market-there are now approximately 18,000,000 women in the labor market compared with a little over 5,000,000 in 1900—and their increasing responsibility for their own support or, additionally, for the support of others. The recent war experience exploded the long held theory that women as such were less efficient industrial workers than men. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Women by the millions took on "men's jobs" and both industry and Government testified to their widespread experience during the war with women's performance on jobs long regarded as men's. Wartime records are full of statistics and personal observations reporting that on a great variety of observed and recorded operations performed by both men and women under comparable conditions many women matched and even outstripped quantity and quality records established by men workers on those same jobs.

Equally important to a consideration of the range of individual performance among both men and women workers is a clear understanding of what is meant by "equal pay for equal work," the popular term for the concept we are discussing. I want here to clear away specifically the most persistent confusions about what would be the effect of the term as used in section 2 of the bills.

First of all, the equal-pay provision, as formulated in the proposed law, is not a device for setting job rates. It would give no authority to the administrator to specify in dollars and cents the amount that an employer must pay for a given kind of work. It would simply require that an employer pay a woman the same rate he pays a man if both are doing work of a comparable character, with due allowance for differences in seniority and certain other factors that I shall go into later. To illustrate, if an employer is paying a man punch-press operator $1.55 an hour, he would be required to pay a woman operator on a similar punch press the same hourly rate.

The requirement to pay the same hourly rate, however, does not always mean that the man's and the woman's total weekly pay check will be the same. If the man operator works longer hours than the woman, his gross wages will be proportionally higher; and if the woman works longer hours than the man, her gross wages would exceed his. In other words, and let me reemphasize this point, an equal pay law would outlaw discrimination against women, on the basis of sex, in their rates of wages. It would not necessarily create uniform gross weekly wages of men and women even where they are working at the same or comparable operations.

The next point I wish to make is that the provisions of section 2 of the bills would not give any authority to standardize wage rates on the same jobs as between different employers, or over broadly separated geographical areas. The law would operate, rather, with reference to individual employers in a locality. For example, let us assume there are two electrical appliance plants owned by different employers in a town called Happy Valley. Let us assume further that in plant No. 1 the hourly rate for a certain job on which both men and women are employed is $1.50 for men and $1.40 for women, and in plant No. 2 the rates for the same job are $1.47 for men and $1.41 for women. This bill would not require plant No. 2 to raise its rate for women to the rate of the men in plant No. 1, i. e., to $1.50 per hour. The obligation of plant No. 2 under the law would be fulfilled if its women workers were paid its own rate for men, $1.47. Nor would plant No. 1 be required to raise its women's rate only to the level of the men's rate in plant No. 2, i. e., $1.47. It would be obliged to raise its women's rate to its own men's rate of $1.50. In other words, the law operates on the individual employer in the community in relation to his existing wage scale. It does not require him to bring his wage scale into line with that of another employer. A further aspect of this same point is the situation of a single employer who operates plants in widely separate geographical localities. Suppose, for example, that the same employer operated two plants, one in New England and one in California. Let us also suppose that the rates for machine bookkeepers were $1.35 for men and $1.30 for women in the New England plant and $1.70 and $1.63 for men and women, respectively, in the California plant. Section 2 of the bills would not require the employer to raise the women's rate in the

New England plant to the west coast men's rate of $1.70, but only to the $1.35 rate paid to men in the east coast plant. Nor would the employer be permitted to continue to pay his west coast women employees only $1.63 because that was not less than his east coast men's rate. The rate for women in the California plant would have to be raised to the west coast men's rate of $1.70. Other variations of this point might be illustrated, but I believe these are sufficient to indicate what the operation under such an equal pay law as is here proposed would be upon a single employer in a given locality.

Next, I wish to point out the effect of equal-pay provisions such as are here proposed upon wage payment by incentive and bonus systems. Here again the law would not require an employer to adopt such systems of wage payment against his free will-or to abandon them if their continuance is desired. Neither would it require that gross weekly wages be the same for all men and women workers on like or comparable jobs irrespective of output. The law would require only that the same basic hourly or weekly guarantees, if any, and the same incentive rates apply to women in the same way as to men.

If, for example, a factory guarantees a certain hourly or weekly minimum for a certain operation, plus an "incentive" rate of 3 cents per dozen of output, then its conformity with the statute is met if the women doing comparable work are paid the same basic guaranty and the same incentive rate as the men. In such a situation, some individual women might earn, on a weekly basis, either more or less gross wages than some individual men, but no equal-pay violation would be involved. If, however, the basis guaranties and/or the incentive rates were lower for women, or if, with reference to the incentive rate women were required to produce more for the same rate (i. e. 3 cents per 11⁄2 dozen of output compared with 3 cents per dozen for men), then an equal pay violation would be involved and an adjustment in the basic provisions of the wage-payment system would be required.

A fourth point to be clarified is the effect of the equal-pay provision on variations in wage rates that frequently occur in a plant, based on length of service of a worker or on differences in the time of day or shift worked. Such variations, if applied uniformely to both men and women, will not be affected. May I take up seniority first? Although a man and woman may be doing comparable work, one may have a service record in the plant of 5 years while the other has only 2. Assuming for the moment that it is the woman who has the shorter service, her rate might, under this proposed act, be less than the man's even though she is doing comparable work, provided that the difference in rates is in accordance with a bona fide seniority increase system which does not itself discriminate on the basis of sex. In other words, so long as the woman is given the same increments as the man on the completion of specified periods of service, there would be no violation of the equal-pay principle. As you will have observed from the wording of section 2, this type of situation is specifically taken into account in H. R. 1584 and H. R. 2438.

Shift differentials, i. e., the practice of paying higher rates for evening or night work, raise another question in relation to the administration of an equal-pay law. Recognition of the basic undesirability of late-shift work has been growing in industry and certain compensations have been granted to offset its disadvantages. One of these is a somewhat higher rate for the same job on the second than on the

first shift, and frequently a still higher rate on the third than on the second shift. Where such shift differentials exist, the equal-pay principle would not require the payment to a woman on a first shift the same rate as to a man on the second or third shift even though she were doing comparable work. In other words the second- or thirdshift rates do not become "the rate for the job" on other shifts. However, if a woman on a second or third shift were doing comparable work with a man on that shift, the employer would be required to pay her the same shift differential as he pays the man.

There remain to be mentioned other types of rate differentials that can be grouped under the phrase "merit increases," as distinguished from purely length of service or seniority increases, on one hand, and the more precise types of incentive payment, on the other. Such increases are also specifically mentioned in H. R. 1584 and H. R. 2438 and would not be violations of the principle, provided they were awarded on the basis of a merit increase plan that did not itself discriminate on the basis of sex. For example, if a man and a woman were hired at the same job-entrance rate, and certain standards of performance and/or production are established for that job, which are correlated with wage increases, then when the individual worker "makes the grade" and is ready for advancement, the increase in rate would have to be made without discrimination on the basis of sex. In other words, so-called "merit" increases could not be in the nature of increases unrelated to job performance and bestowed at whim, or by plan, upon workers of one sex but not of the other. This does

not mean, of course, that an employer would be precluded from giving any special merit award that he felt was justified by individual performance, to either a man or a woman worker. It simply means that merit increases related to the normal work routine must follow a nondiscriminatory pattern.

Before closing I wish to point out certain typographical errors in the printed bills that need correction in the next print:

(1) H. R. 2438, page 2, line 24 beginning with the words "or the" and line 25 should be stricken; they appear to be a printer's error. This defect does not appear in H. R. 1584.

(2) H. R. 1584, page 3, line 6, the section number is omitted. "SEC. 3" should be inserted. The same omission occurs in H. R. 2438, page 3, line 8, and should be corrected also.

Finally, may I urge the committee to give careful consideration to the problems that these bills are intended to deal with, and to the evidence put before it, so that we may get a remedy for a situation which is unfair to women and dangerous to the national economy.

I wonder if I might, Mr. Chairman, make one comment on the testimony that was given just before you permitted me to appear, namely: the proposed substitution in the definition of unfair wage practices, section 2.

It was pointed out to the committee that a similar proposal had been made in New York State. I am convinced that that proposal if adopted would defeat the purpose of this legislation as it is now written. Before stating my reasons I would like to add that it is my understanding that the defeat of the proposal in New York was due to labor opposition to it. The revision proposed would be one that could legally be met if the employer reduced men to a rate which he paid to women.