Black women in Mississippi demand state-level pay protections

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• Hari Sreenivasan:

  Last week in Mississippi, the state House passed the equal pay for equal work act, which would create legal recourse for employees paid less for the same work based on sex.

  Mississippi is the last state in the nation without an equal pay provision in state law, after Alabama enacted one in 2019. The equal pay bill now heads to the Mississippi Senate, where a similar measure is also pending.

  The momentum around enacting equal pay legislation is in part due to the work of the Mississippi Black Women's Roundtable. For years the advocacy organization has called attention to the racial implications of Mississippi's gender wage gap, and has lobbied for an equal pay law at the state level.

  Last month, before the new bills were introduced in the legislature, NewsHour weekend's Ivette Feliciano sat down with the executive director of the Mississippi Black Women's roundtable, Cassandra Welchlin.

• Ivette Feliciano:

  Cassandra, who are your clients here at the Mississippi Black Women's Roundtable, and why is the work you do so important for women in this state?

• Cassandra Welchlin:

  So the Mississippi Black Women's Roundtable, we are actually an intergenerational network of Black women and girls working to increase the civic participation among Black women and girls, increasing voting rights among Black women and girls and advocating for just public policies that impact their lives. Our people are Black women and girls in the state of Mississippi.

• Ivette Feliciano:

  Mississippi is the only state in the country without a law that requires equal pay for equal work by women and men. What does that mean for women of color in Mississippi, specifically Black women in the state?

• Cassandra Welchlin:

  What that means is women are losing wages at higher levels because they are Black and because they are a woman. When women can't earn a living wage and take care of their families, right? It impacts every area of their life. And when we talk about Black women, Black women make $0.56 on the dollar compared to a white non-Hispanic man, and she's losing over the course of a year over $21,000. Over the course of a 40-year career, she loses over $849,000. So what that means is that she doesn't have enough money to save up for retirement. She doesn't have resources for health care, for putting her children through college. And so she's never able to recover those lost wages. We have been working for the last, I'd say, six years to get an equal pay law passed in the state of Mississippi. So women in the state are half the workforce, two-thirds of the minimum wage earners. And when we talk about who are the breadwinners and co-breadwinners of their families, they are women. And eight out of 10 Black women are breadwinners of their families. Women in this state. Black, white, Latina, indigenous women are the backbone, the economic drivers here in the state of Mississippi. But yet we're not making the wages that we need to, and Black and brown women are really at the center of that.

• Ivette Feliciano:

  Why have efforts to pass an equal pay law fallen short in the state of Mississippi?

• Cassandra Welchlin:

  There really isn't an excuse at all on why we shouldn't have an equal pay law. But what we have heard is that it's going to hurt small businesses or it's going to hurt business businesses as a whole. We want employers to be a partner with us in this. The state of Mississippi always says that we are a business friendly state. We need to then treat our employees who are the women in this state like they are valued. We've heard there's a federal law. What we know is that that federal law does not protect women at the state level the way it should, because it creates a lot of loopholes.

• Ivette Feliciano:

  The two federal laws, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009? What are the loopholes?

• Cassandra Welchlin:

  There's no consistency, you know, across the board. And so every state can interpret it right, differently. When the judges interpret the laws in a way that prevents women from recovering the damages, it has in some ways put the burden on employees to prove, you know, there there's wage discrimination. It's just problematic, you know, all the way around.

• Ivette Feliciano:

  What are your hopes for this next legislative session?

• Cassandra Welchlin:

  We want a good equal pay law. We have built a bipartisan coalition on this issue because we understand that it is good for Mississippi's economy. If we had an equal pay law, it would put $4.15 billion back into the state's economy. That is huge.

  We also think this gives us an opportunity to not just talk about equal pay, but to talk about women's economic security. Our initiative, the Mississippi Women's Economic Security introduces pay, leave, sick leave, increasing wages, child care, it's putting an agenda, a woman's agenda before the Legislature. And so this is just one way. Our labor has built, you know, it's built this country. It is past time that our labor is honored and is valued. And we're not going away, and we're bringing these women to the table with us.