The United States passed the Equal Pay Act in 1963. The campaign to enact this principle, however, began in the late nineteenth century as a demand of male trade unionists to prevent wage cutting by women in unregulated labor markets and was supported by several federal agencies during the First World War. The principle received its most important endorsement during the Second World War when the National War Labor Board, under General Order No. 16, embraced as its national policy equal pay for "comparable quality and quantity of work." Hoping to build on this wartime precedent, the U.S. Women's Bureau campaigned unsuccessfully for equal pay legislation throughout the postwar period. However, twelve states enacted equal pay laws, and 17 percent of collective bargaining agreements included equal pay clauses by the mid-1950s.
During the Kennedy administration, the Women's Bureau resumed its campaign. To win congressional approval of the equal pay principle, supporters substituted "equal work" for "comparable work" in a provision added to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1937. These compromises significantly limited the reach of the law. The equal pay guarantee reached only the wage and salary occupations covered by the FLSA. Jobs held primarily by women, and especially women of color, were thus excluded. Moreover, the language of equal pay for equal work has proved too narrow to address the problem of wage inequity in an economy characterized by a high level of occupational segregation by both sex and race. The absence of men from many workplaces has made it difficult to undertake the comparison required to prove pay discrimination. Feminists have developed the ideas of "comparable worth" or "pay equity" to overcome these limitations of the Equal Pay Act.
Helene Silverberg
See also
Comparable Worth.
