Mississippi is one of 4 states with no equal-pay laws

Seven years ago on Jan. 29, a newly elected President Barack Obama kept his campaign promise and made the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act the first bill he signed into law after taking office.

The law overturned a U.S. Supreme Court decision that restricted the period for filing a lawsuit alleging employment discrimination in pay based on sex, race, national origin, age, religion or disability.

The law was the latest federal effort to address what’s known as the wage gap between working men and women.

Most states have likewise adopted their own equal pay laws that forbid gender-based differences in wages for work that requires equal skill, training and effort.

And some have even enacted comparable worth laws that prohibit pay discrimination between jobs that, while different, are of similar value to the employer.

Mississippi is one of four states – along with South Carolina, Alabama and Utah – that have no equal pay or comparable worth laws. And women’s rights groups say that legislative omission contributes to Mississippi’s striking disparity in pay for women and men.

A Mississippi woman who works 40 hours a week earns, on average, about $31,500. But a full-time man earns an average of about $41,100, according to estimates by the National Partnership for Women & Families.

The combined lost wages of working Mississippi women amount to nearly $4 billion a year in lost spending power, the partnership estimates.

If the wages were made equal, a working Mississippi woman would be able to buy 77 more weeks of groceries or pay nine months of mortgage and utility payments. That’s significant in a state where more than 78,000 households that are headed by women have incomes below the federal poverty line.

Southern states have traditionally resisted laws that address employee conditions and rights, opting instead to give employers broad discretion in these areas with limited regulation, said Emily Martin, general counsel and vice president for workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center.

“But even in the South, it’s rare to have no laws speaking to the issue (of equal pay) whatsoever,” Martin said of Mississippi.

State fair-pay laws are important and can help close loopholes in federal protections, Martin said.

For example the federal Equal Pay Act of 1963 allows unequal pay for the same job as long as it’s based on something other than gender.

“You could be paying the man more because he speaks French even you don’t have to speak French for the job,” Martin said.

California recently barred employers from retaliating against employees who break company rules by discussing their co-workers’ pay with colleagues.

Other states are considering legislation to require equal pay for “substantially equal” work so “trivial differences in job responsibilities or job titles can’t defeat an equal-pay claim,” Martin said.

“If the men are all janitors and the women are all housekeepers, there’s probably not a great reason to be paying the men more. Even if the jobs are different in some respects,” Martin said.

This story was originally published January 29, 2016 at 5:40 PM with the headline "Mississippi is one of 4 states with no equal-pay laws."