President Obama officially designated Tuesday as Equal Pay Day, marking the day American women had finally worked the three-and-a-half extra months it takes for them to earn the same as men do in a calendar year. American women make just 77 percent as much as their male counterparts, costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars over their working lives.
In 2009, Obama signed legislation aimed at closing the pay gap that exists between men and women, and Equal Pay Day represented a push for further efforts to address the problem. But the inequities facing female workers apparently don’t exist in the eyes of New Hampshire GOP spokesman Tory Mazzola, who said efforts to close the pay gap were actually about giving a “hand-out to trial lawyers,” WBIN TV reports:
MAZZOLA: Instead of being about fair pay, it’s really about a hand-out to trial lawyers because it expands the areas that people can sue their employers unnecessarily.
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Still, the GOP hasn’t exactly been sympathetic to the equal pay cause. It fought to prevent passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Act in 2009 and blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act in 2010. The campaign of presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, meanwhile, has struggled to indicate that it is even aware of the problem, and the candidate himself has yet to say exactly where he stands on either piece of legislation.
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