What Obama Should Order Next: Paycheck Fairness

One of the barriers to equal pay for women is the lack of available information about pay scales.

By Martha Burk/Otherwords.org When President Barack Obama talked about pay equity in his State of the Union speech last month and connected the dots between gender and low-wage work, advocates in the audience were ecstatic. Representative Rosa DeLauro, lead sponsor of the Paycheck Fairness Act (PFA) in the House, was on her feet cheering — along with many of the Connecticut Democrat’s colleagues. Though Obama had said in an interview a few weeks earlier that Congress should pass this legislation, this time he spoke in generalities about the issue — except for one big idea. He pledged to bypass Congress and issue an executive order to raise the minimum wage for workers employed by federal contractors to $10.10 an hour. And now, he’s done it.