by ©2019 Sarah Becker Copyright © 2019 Sarah Becker Equal Pay Day – Let’s Celebrate??? April 2 is Equal Pay Day. Wanna celebrate? According to the American Association of University Women’s 2018 annual report, The Simple Truth about the Gender Pay Gap, Virginia ranks 29th in gender equality. The Commonwealth’s Equal Pay laws are “weak,” and the pay gap is “real.” Virginia women “are paid 79 cents, on average, for every dollar paid to a man.” “While the nation’s unemployment rate is down, and the number of women working is up, the wage gap is sadly remaining stagnant,” AAUW Chief Executive Officer Kim Churches said. “It’s unacceptable.” The Equal Pay Act became law in 1963; the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. In the United States, in 2017, median annual earnings for full-time workers were $41,977 for women, $52,146 for men. “If the pay gap narrows at the same rate of change since 2001, it will not close until 2106,” the AAUW explained. Female pay ratios by occupation: financial managers 65%, physicians and surgeons 71%, lawyers 76%, education administrators 78%, and registered nurses 92%. Iceland is first in the world when it comes to gender pay equity. “With a population of just 330,000—fewer people than currently work at Amazon—the island nation has had progressive equal pay laws for years.” Not so in the United States. President Donald Trump (R-NY) froze an equal pay wage data rule in 2017. Compliance, The White House said “imposed an incredible amount of burden” on business. The President also removed the Equal Pay Pledge from The White House website. “Equal work deserves equal pay,” Congressman Don Beyer (D-VA) said in 2015. “This isn’t simply an issue of fairness, it’s about strengthening our middle class—putting food on the table, gas in the tank,…
By Sarah Becker ©2017 Born in 1917—100 years ago—President John F. Kennedy (D-MA) died in his prime. On November 22, 1963 an assassin shot Kennedy dead. He died of a wound in the brain caused by a rifle bullet. Kennedy was the fourth U.S. President to succumb to such wounds. For Kennedy, the past was prologue. It included wealth: he received a $1 million trust fund from his father in 1938. Also education: Kennedy studied at the London School of Economics in 1935, and graduated cum laude from Harvard University in 1940. His first book, While England Slept, was published in 1940 at age 23. He took his first political step in 1946. Kennedy represented Massachusetts 11th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1947 to 1953, elected to the US Senate in 1952, and passed over as a Vice Presidential nominee in 1956. On August 24, 1960 candidate Kennedy launched the southern leg of his Presidential campaign from Alexandria, Virginia. The Alexandria Gazette reported: “With presidential candidate Kennedy in the fore…politicos…will stage what promises to be the largest political rally ever held in the city of Alexandria. The rally sponsors…hope that spacious George Washington High School stadium, which seats 14,000 persons, will be jam-packed to a standing room only condition.” “The affair will launch the Democrats’ national campaign in the south…The oratory, to which all else was a prelude, indicated the issues which will be most stressed…these bore down on the experience of [his opponent] Richard M. Nixon, the matter of foreign policy and the Communist threat. It avoided the grating problems of [a divided] political party…the [Democrat] Party platform on civil rights and sociological issues.” Virginia Dixiecrats “deplored the Democratic Party’s reckless disregard for constitutionality; principles in the Civil Rights Plank and inflationary Federal spending.” “The…