Library Worklife

Volume 3, No. 4 • April 2006

Salaries & Pay Equity

Equal Pay Day is Tuesday, April 25!

From the National Committee on Pay Equity—www.pay-equity.org:

"Equal Pay Day is observed in April to indicate how far into each year a woman must work to earn as much as a man earned in the previous year. Tuesday symbolizes the day when women’s wages catch up to men’s wages from the previous week."

NCPE encourages everyone to "wear RED on Equal Pay Day to symbolize how far women and minorities are ‘in the red’ with their pay!"

Form a WAGE Club for Equal Pay Day

[Editor’s Note: This letter is from Evelyn Murphy, author of Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men and What To Do About It, founder of the WAGE (Women Are Getting Even) Project, and guest speaker at an ALA-APA program at the American Library Association Annual Conference in June 2006 . See also the book review from Library Worklife, volume 3, number 2.]

Dear WAGE Project Supporters,

I am writing to let you know about an exciting opportunity to take action on the critical issue of the wage gap in conjunction with Equal Pay Day, April 25, 2006.

The WAGE Project is excited to report that support for the WAGE Club project is spreading fast!

The National Committee on Pay Equity—a coalition of national women’s rights, civil rights, employee rights, and professional organizations committed to closing the wage gap—is partnering with the WAGE Project to launch a national grassroots collaborative effort to launch WAGE clubs on April 25, Equal Pay Day.

We are rapidly adding WAGE clubs to the inaugural list to be announced in the national press on April 25th, and would like you to join us today by committing to launch a wage club in your community to help women obtain the tools, support and momentum they need to get even at work. We hope to have 100 groups committed to launch WAGE clubs by Equal Pay Day.

Launching a WAGE Club is easy. Simply set a date, invite women, and your WAGE Club is off and running. WAGE Clubs are just groups of 5–10 women who come together to talk about the wage gap and to obtain the tools, support and momentum they need to get even at work. The WAGE club discussion guide, available at www.wageproject.org/content/discussion.pdf, is a great resource for ideas and can help you get your WAGE club started.

Wondering who to invite? Invite your friends, neighbors, or colleagues who care about equal pay and eliminating sex discrimination in the workplace. You might also consider inviting your organization to launch a club or invite or other women’s groups in your community to help you get the word out or to launch a group themselves. Organizations committed to economic empowerment for women like the YWCA’s Business and Professional Women’s (BPW) groups, AAUW, and many other national women’s organizations have become involved in this project!

We hope you will join us in this exciting new collaborative grassroots effort. Together we are working to help every woman get paid what they deserve. Please check out the WAGE Project website at www.wageproject.org for more information or to register your WAGE club to be a part of our exciting April 25th announcement!

Let’s eliminate the wage gap,

Evelyn Murphy, PhD
President, The WAGE Project

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