Murray, former HELP Chair, is a longtime leader in the fight to ensure equal pay for equal work
Murray: “Women don’t want more discrimination. They don’t want more of their wages stolen by bosses like Elon. They just want the pay they earned. They just want to be treated decently—and paid fairly no matter who they are.”
Washington, D.C. — Today, on Equal Pay Day, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), a senior member and former Chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, led the entire Senate Democratic caucus in reintroducing the Paycheck Fairness Act, legislation to combat pay discrimination and help close the gender pay gap by strengthening the Equal Pay Act of 1963, ending the practice of pay secrecy, and strengthening available remedies to ensure wronged employees can challenge pay discrimination and hold employers accountable. U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro (D, CT-03) led the reintroduction of the Paycheck Fairness Act in the House today.
More than five decades after the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the gender wage gap still exists—and alarmingly, for the first time in 20 years, the gender pay gap widened in 2023. Across all workers in the United States, women were typically paid 75 cents for every dollar paid to a man in 2023, adding up to a $14,170 pay difference in a year. U.S. women overall lost $1.7 trillion in earnings overall in 2023, according to a recent analysis by the National Partnership for Women & Families.
“When you do the same work as your colleagues, you should get the same pay, and no one should get to rip you off and pay you less because you are a woman. The principle is simple—but the problem we are talking about is far from trivial; it’s an injustice that compounds over time, robbing women of hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of their career,” Senator Murray said.
“For anyone who is serious about fighting for women, for anyone who is serious about ensuring our economy is built on merit and not undermined by discrimination, this is basic stuff. But Trump and Elon—some of the richest men in the world—are right now eliminating a 60-year-old executive order that helped ensure federal contractors don’t discriminate against women, illegally firing commissioners at the EEOC, which enforces existing pay discrimination laws, and making it easier to rip workers off,” Senator Murray continued. “Women don’t want more discrimination. They don’t want more of their pay stolen by bosses like Elon. They just want the pay they earned. They just want to be treated decently—and paid fairly no matter who they are. Republicans can choose to stand with billionaires who cheat their workers—but by reintroducing the Paycheck Fairness Act today, Democrats are showing that we stand with women, we stand with workers, we stand for fairness, and we are going to keep fighting to make sure people get the pay they have rightfully earned, down to the last dime.”
“Equal Pay Day marks how far into the current year a woman must work to catch up to what her male counterpart earned in the previous year,” said Rep. DeLauro, Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Committee. “Six decades after passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, women working full-time or part-time still earn 75 cents for every dollar earned by men. We are in a cost of living crisis – this must end. Equal pay for equal work is a simple concept – men and women in the same job deserve the same pay. It is time we make it real it for the millions of American women who are being unfairly undervalued in the workplace. Let’s enact the Paycheck Fairness Act and empower working women by giving them the tools to ensure their contributions to the workplace are properly respected and reflected in their pay.”
Senator Murray’s Paycheck Fairness Act would:
- Require employers to prove that pay disparities exist for legitimate, job-related reasons. In doing so, it ensures that employers who try to justify paying a man more than a woman for the same job must show the disparity is not sex-based, but job-related and necessary.
- Ban retaliation against workers who discuss their wages.
- Remove obstacles in the Equal Pay Act to facilitate participation in class action lawsuits that challenge systemic pay discrimination, by allowing workers to opt-out, rather than requiring them to opt-in.
- Improve the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) and Department of Labor’s (DOL) tools for enforcing the Equal Pay Act. To help these enforcement agencies better uncover and remedy wage discrimination, the bill will require the collection of compensation data from certain employers, including federal contractors.
- Provide assistance to all businesses to help them with their equal pay practices, recognize excellence in pay practices by businesses, and empower women and girls by creating a negotiation skills training program.
- Prohibit employers from relying on and seeking the salary history of prospective employees.
Throughout her career, Senator Murray has been a leader in Congress in fighting for efforts to close the gender pay gap and ensure equal pay for equal work, and she has helped lead the fight in Congress for paid family and medical leave since she first joined Congress. Senator Murray leads the Bringing an End to Harassment by Enhancing Accountability and Rejecting Discrimination (BE HEARD) in the Workplace Act, comprehensive legislation to prevent workplace harassment, strengthen and expand key protections for workers, and support workers in seeking accountability and justice. Senator Murray leads the Wage Theft Prevention and Wage Recovery Act, comprehensive legislation to put hard-earned wages back in workers’ pockets and crack down on employers who unfairly withhold wages from their employees. Murray also recently helped reintroduce the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act to protect workers’ right to join and form a union in order to demand better pay, benefits, and working conditions—legislation she first introduced in the 116th Congress. Murray also introduced the Children Harmed in Life-threatening or Dangerous (CHILD) Labor Act last Congress, new legislation to protect children from exploitative child labor practices and hold the companies and individuals who take advantage of them accountable.
In recent weeks, Senator Murray raised the alarm on President Trump’s illegal firing of EEOC Commissioners Charlotte Burrows and Jocelyn Samuels and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Member Gwynne Wilcox, as well as the firings of EEOC General Counsel Karla Gilbride and NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo—Murray has long championed the vital work and mission of the EEOC and the NLRB in protecting workers’ rights.
The full text of the Paycheck Fairness Act is HERE.
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