Share this
Twitter
Myspace
Digg
Del.icio.us
Reddit
Slashdot
Furl
Yahoo
Technorati
Newsvine
Facebook
Export PDF
Print
E-mail
Tags
Article IndexBY ADELE SAMMARCO
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
The first woman to hold the Senate Majority Leader post in the state of New Jersey believes in inspiring women committed to the values of public service.
Keeping in-step with that commitment, political insiders say Democratic State Senator Barbara Buono is on the verge of launching her own gubernatorial campaign against Republican Governor Chris Christie next year.
“I’m not afraid to stand up to the Governor, no matter how popular he is,” said Buono Saturday to a group of Democratic leaders in Freehold.
On the 92nd anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, the Monmouth County Democrats hosted a fundraiser to honor Democratic Women Mayors and Councilwomen and invited State Senator Barbara Buono to be their featured speaker.
Buono told more than four dozen Democratic leaders from throughout Monmouth County that women in Democratic leadership roles should encourage other women to get more involved in their communities. Not only saying, but by actually doing, Buono has launched a Young Women’s Leadership Program, a seminar engaging high school junior and seniors in the political process.
Recognizing the women's suffrage movement and fearless turn-of-the-century pioneers, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who spoke out for a woman's right to vote against a sea of unpopularity, Buono said, "When we realize we stand on the shoulders of giants, we must ensure that future generations stand up for their convictions. It's important that we all stand up for our convictions."
Nearly a century later holding true to those convictions, one of President Obama’s first acts as leader of the free world was to sign the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 stating that the 180-day statute of limitations for filing an equal-pay lawsuit regarding pay discrimination resets with each new discriminatory paycheck.
The law was a direct answer to the Ledbetter versus Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., a U.S. Supreme Court decision holding the statute of limitations for presenting an equal-pay lawsuit begins on the date the employer makes the initial discriminatory wage decision, not the date of the most recent paycheck, as a lower court had ruled.
The first bill passed the House, but failed to survive a cloture vote in the Senate due to opposition of Republican Senators.
During the 2008 campaign, Republican presidential candidate John McCain opposed the bill. Then-candidate Barack Obama supported it.
A new version of the bill was eventually re-introduced in the first session of the 111th United States Congress, obtaining the necessary support to pass cloture. The bill became the first act of Congress signed by President Obama since his inauguration in January, 2009.
That persistence and tenacity strikes a cord with Buono who says, "What's right isn't always popular and what's popular, isn't always right." and then added,"When you are a woman, you have to be smarter, tougher and work three times harder."
Barbara Buono was born in Newark, the youngest of three sisters. She grew up in Nutley in Essex County, where her mother worked as a substitute teacher and her father, who was born in Italy, worked as a butcher.
During her freshman year at Montclair State College, her father died from a heart attack.
Consequently, she put herself through college, financing the remaining three years with tuition assistance grants, veterans’ and social security death benefits, as well as some part-time jobs.
In 1975, Buono graduated, and worked in the Montclair Public Library, as a part-time reporter for the Star-Ledger and in the Essex County Probation Department. She took out loans to attend Rutgers Law School, and received her Juris Doctorate in 1979.
Buono says her own personal struggle shows how she understands the role of relying on yourself while at the same time, appreciates how government can play a role in helping during difficult times.
Contrary to what pay-equity advocates say, women's 77 cents to men's dollar does NOT mean women are paid less than men in the same jobs. Nor does it mean, even more incredibly in the vein of “men are stronger than women” (which means to many that every man is stronger than every woman), that every woman earns 23% less than every man, perhaps leading some of the more benighted and the blinkered ideological to believe Diane Sawyer of ABC News earns less than the young man walking back and forth on the street wearing a “Pizzas $5” sign.
The figures are arrived at by comparing the sexes' median incomes: women's median is 77 percent of men's. In 2009, the median income of full-time, year-round workers was $47,127 for men, compared to $36,278 for women or 77 percent of men's median. http://tinyurl.com/5pl8or
Median means 50% of workers earn above the figures and 50% below. That means that a lot of female workers in the higher ranges of women's median make more money than a lot of male workers in the lower ranges of men's median.
The advocates' use of “women's 77 cents to men's dollar" doesn't account for the number of hours worked each week, experience, seniority, training, education or even the job description itself. It compares all women to all men, not people in the same job with the same experience. So the salary of a 60-year-old male computer engineer with 30 years at his company is weighed against that of a young first-year female teacher. Also, men are much more likely than women to work two jobs; hence, more often than women, a man earning, say, $50,000 from his two jobs is weighed against a women earning $25,000 from her one job, so that he appears to be unfairly earning twice as much as she.
Over the decades, strategically ignoring the true meaning of "women's 77 cents to men's dollar" has been less than productive:
No law yet has closed the gender wage gap — not the 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, not Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, not the 1991 amendments to Title VII, not affirmative action (which has benefited mostly white women, the group most vocal about the wage gap - http://tinyurl.com/74cooen), not diversity, not the countless state and local laws and regulations, not the horde of overseers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and not the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act..
That's because women's pay-equity advocates, who always insist one more law is needed, continue to overlook the effects of female AND male behavior:
Millions of wives still choose to have no pay at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of "The Secrets of Happily Married Women," stay-at-home wives, including the childless who represent an estimated 10 percent, constitute a growing niche. "In the past few years,” he says in a CNN report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier....” at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka. If indeed a higher percentage of women is staying at home, perhaps it's because feminists and the media have told women for years that female workers are paid less than men in the same jobs — so why bother working if they're going to be penalized and humiliated for being a woman.)
Stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living in luxury? Because they're supported by their husband, an “employer” who pays them to stay at home.
The implication of this is probably obvious to 10-year-olds but seems incomprehensible to or is ignored by feminists and the liberal media: If millions of wives are able to accept NO wages, millions of other wives, whose husbands' incomes range from moderate to high, are able to:
-accept low wages
-refuse overtime and promotions
-choose jobs based on interest first, wages second — the reverse of what men tend to do
-take more unpaid days off
-avoid uncomfortable wage-bargaining (http://tinyurl.com/3a5nlay)
-work part-time instead of full-time
Each of these job choices lowers women's median pay relative to men's.
Women are able to make these choices because they are supported — or, if unmarried, anticipate being supported — by a husband who must earn more than if he'd chosen never to marry. (Still, even many men who shun marriage, unlike their female counterparts, feel their self worth is tied to their net worth.) This is how MEN help create the wage gap: as a group they tend more than women to pass up jobs that interest them for ones that pay well.
"Will the Ledbetter Act Help Women?" http://tinyurl.com/blge6fm