Four years ago today President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, with Lilly Ledbetter, who suffered 20 years of pay discrimination while doing the same work as men at her Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. factory, looking on.

Now, she is urging people to call on Congress to pass the recently reintroduced Paycheck Fairness Act, calling it “the next step.”

Today, women make just 77 cents for every dollar made by a man for equal work, about $434,000 over their careers. Sponsors of the reintroduced Paycheck Fairness Act, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), say the proposed bill will help close that gap. The pair has introduced the bill several times in recent years, but Republicans have been able to block action on the bill, most recently last summer with a Senate filibuster.

In a 52-47 vote, the U.S. Senate blocked a vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act this afternoon. With 60 votes needed to proceed to a vote on the bill, Republicans succeeded in blocking pay equity for women for the second time. 

This is a cross-post from MomsRising.org and the Labor Project for Working Families.

When Annie Bolgiano was growing up, her mother, a forest firefighter, told her daughter she could become anything she wanted. Then Annie went to college and learned another lesson:

You can go into whatever profession you want, but you are statistically unlikely to make a salary equal to your male counterparts.

Do you believe wealthy Americans and corporations should pay their fair share in taxes and women should receive equal pay?  Then April 17 is “Twofer Tuesday.” As part of the 99% Spring movement, some 100,000 activists will use Tax Day as a platform to demand that the 1% and corporations pay their fair share. April 17 is also Equal Pay Day, the date symbolizing how far into 2012 women must work to earn what men earned in 2011.

Emmelle Israel, AFL-CIO Media Outreach fellow, sends us this.

At the current rate, pay equity between men and women won’t occur for another 45 years, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR).

The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled 5-4 that as many as 1.6 million women who are current or former Wal-Mart employees cannot sue Wal-Mart for pay discrimination in a class-action suit. A lower court had ruled that the women could join together in a class action.