by Lisa Maatz
IN 2012 AFTER the Right-to-Work law signed by Gov. Rick Snyder went into effect, right-to-work supporters said the law would give workers freedom of association and promote job creation.
Critics of the legislation said that workers’ wages would drop without unions’ collective bargaining power. The law will impact all workers, the critics say, potentially reducing salaries and benefits, but it could disproportionately affect women, who already have lower annual earnings than men.
The average full-time worker in a right-to-work state makes approximately $1,500 less per year than a similar worker in a non-right-to-work state, according to a 2011 briefing paper by the Economic Policy Institute. And women’s wages in right-to-work states are 4.4 percent lower than in non-right-to-work states, while men’s are only 1.7 percent lower, according to the EPI analysis.
“The policy will hurt everybody, but women and minorities to a larger extent,” says Carol Rosenblatt, executive director of the Coalition of Labor Union Women.
In 2012, Michigan ranked seventh lowest among states when it comes to gender pay equity: women made 74 cents for every dollar men earn, according to a recent study by the American Association of University Women (AAUW). Nationally, women make 77 cents to men’s $1. Looking at median annual salaries for full-time workers, women in Michigan made $36,931, compared with $50,053 made by men.
Michigan was ranked 44th of the 50 states in the wage gap between men and women, the study found.
In 2013, Michigan’s media reported that, on average, Michigan women who work full-time, year-round job were paid 74 cents for every dollar paid to a man. The national average wage gap was 77 cents.
In 2013, it was reported that the wage gap is even wider for African-American and Hispanic women in Michigan, “who earn 68 cents and 55 cents, respectively, to every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men,” according to a piece published in The Christian Science Monitor.
In 2013, Wyoming had the worst wage gap in the country where women earn 67 cents to a man’s dollar. Wyoming’s pay gap was followed by Louisiana and Utah’s with 69 cents, West Virginia with 71 cents, North Dakota with 73 cents and Mississippi with 74 cents.
For the past several years, Washington, D.C., has the smallest gap with only a 10-cent pay difference between a men and women. Other states to top the list, include Vermont with 87 cents, Maryland with 86 cents, and California and Nevada with 85 cents.
In a 2013 op-ed Michigan’s U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow wrote: “Even in 2013, we have not achieved full gender equality. In Michigan, women are still paid only 74 cents for every dollar a man makes. Over a lifetime, that’s more than $500,000 less money than their male counterparts for a typical middle-class woman. In fact, according to the National Women’s Law Center, Michigan has the 7th worse wage gap for women in the country. This isn’t just a women’s issue. This is a family issue.”
It’s 2014, and two years after Michigan’s Governor signed a Right-to-Work law into effect. As it turns out, neither the predictions of supporters or critics’ have come to pass. The 2014 gender pay gap study was released to correspond with Equal Pay Day and the data show that Michigan still has one of the largest gender pay gaps in the United States, but that the gap has remained steady.
Michigan still has the 7th largest gender pay gap in the nation, and Michigan’s women still earn 74 cents for every dollar earned by a man with the same qualifications worked in the same job. In other words, Michigan’s gender pay gap is static.
Basically, the moral of this story is: Another year, another several million dollars lost to the gender pay gap.
The gender pay gap in the United States is static, as well.
For the last decade, median earnings for women working full time, year-round have been just 77 percent of men’s earnings. This oft-cited percentage stems from U.S. Census Bureau data and is not, despite critiques, something made up by feminists to give women raises. However, that stat is just a snapshot of the pay gap in the U.S., so it’s important to drill down deeper.
The American Association of University Women’s annual research report, Graduating to a Pay Gap, does just that.
The report controls for occupation, major, hours worked, parenthood, and many other factors to reveal that college-educated women working full time were paid an unexplained seven percent less than their male counterparts were paid one year after graduation. To clarify, this analysis looks at men and women who have made the same educational and occupational choices and still finds a gap.
According to the AAUW report, some respond to this research by saying that seven percent is too small to worry about.
Plus, for the women on the short end of this salary stick, the gap is not “just” seven percent. That gap has immediate consequences, like causing women to have greater difficulty repaying student loans. Women and men pay the same tuition and graduate with comparable student debt. But Graduating to a Pay Gap found that among full-time workers repaying loans one year after college graduation, more than half of women (53 percent) compared with 39 percent of men were paying more than what they could reasonably afford toward their debt.
Women fall further and further behind the eight ball over time. AAUW’s research report The Simple Truth about the Gender Pay Gap found that women are paid about 90 percent of what men are paid until age 35, when women’s median earnings typically drop to 75–80 percent of men’s. So, not only does the pay gap make us feel like we’ve traveled back in time, but it’s also only going to get worse over time — and women cannot ever truly recover. Salaries dictate how much women will have for retirement and function as the starting point for all future raises.
In many cases, women aren’t even privy to the knowledge that they started out behind. That was true for Kerri Sleeman of Michigan, who testified April 1 at a Senate committee hearing on equal pay.
When Sleeman’s employer of five years—a Michigan mechanical engineering firm—went under in 2003, she learned through bankruptcy court that almost all the men she had supervised earned more than she did.
Sleeman had tried to negotiate her salary when she was hired but was told salaries were nonnegotiable. After she found out about the discrepancy, she spoke to her former supervisor, who unapologetically informed her that the young men were likely paid more because they were sole breadwinners for wives and children—never mind Sleeman’s glowing performance reviews and supervisory role.
To her employer, she just wasn’t the right gender to make a salary that would have helped her refinance her home, pay for her husband’s heart surgery, and help her parents and in-laws in retirement.
Thus, the aggregate data of the AAUW’s gender pay gap reports would suggest that in Michigan Right-to-Work is not the villain it was predicted to be—legalized sexism is holding this state’s women in pay equity purgatory.