Hi John,

This week, we’re talking about wages.

In the middle of World War II, the War Labor Board declared on Sept. 26, 1942: equal pay for equal work.

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, an amendment to the National Labor Relations Act aimed at eliminating sex-based wage discrimination.

And yet, women still earn less than men. Women are paid 82 cents for every dollar paid to men. Women in the workplace are undervalued and underpaid.

If you disaggregate the data by race, there are even larger wage gaps for Black women, Latinas, women from certain Asian communities, and Native Hawaiian and Native American women. Transgender women’s earnings drop by nearly one-third after transition.

A union contract can help bridge the wage gap. Hourly wages for women represented by a union are 5.8% higher on average than the wages nonunion women earn with similar characteristics.

The union difference is real.

So our action item again this week is for the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act—to fight for our right to join and form unions. Call and urge your senators to vote YES on the PRO Act.

In Solidarity,

Team AFL-CIO