The AFFIRMATIVE ACTION issue as it will appear on the ballot isn't just about color, it is about the demographic breakdown of every type of people; women will lose the ability to have procedures such as mamograms covered by their insurance, men will lose prostate cancer screening. This ignorant legislation will divide each type of person: white, black, man, woman, etc. No group may be singled out differently than another. Under this ballot iniative, women - regardless their color or race - stand to lose the most.

Equal Rights, Equal Pay, and Equality and Diversity throughout our Communities. Because he Cares, People first.

Women and the Economy: The Gender Pay Gap that is Crippling Michigan’s Economic Recovery

The long-term increase in women’s labor force participation has stalled, and the gender wage gap has increased. The effects of the economic downturn continue to affect women’s employment, unemployment, labor force participation, and wages even now, 43 months after the start of the recession.

JOB LOSSES
Women, however, are faring differently in the current economy. In the ten-year period leading up to the last recession, from March 1991 to March 2001 (dating from the trough of the previous recession), women gained over 12 million jobs. The largest gains for women were in professional business services, where women’s employment grew by an average of 0.44 percent per month (2.7 million jobs over this period), and education and health services, where women’s employment grew by 0.30 percent per month (3.1 million jobs). In fact, every sector, except manufacturing and the federal government, gained jobs for women.

However, between March 2001 and August 2004 (the most recent month for which these data are available), women lost jobs in a number of key industries. Women have lost the most jobs since March 2001 in the information, retail, professional business services, and manufacturing industries. The information industry lost 347,000 jobs for women, the retail industry lost 367,000 jobs for women, and the manufacturing industry lost over 1 million jobs for women. The rate of decline in women’s manufacturing employment was much larger in the years since the recession began (-0.47 percent per month) than in the previous period (-0.04 percent per month). Even among industries where the number of jobs has grown since March 2001, all have shown slower growth rates than in the period leading up to the recession. Education, health, and government continue to provide jobs for female workers, while showing weaker growth than previously. In fact, the recession of March to November 2001 inaugurated the only period of sustained job loss for women in the last forty years. If job growth for women had continued at the average pace of the 1991 to 2001 period, a total of 4.1 million more jobs would be available for women.

UNEMPLOYMENT
Women’s unemployment in September 2004 (the last month for which we have data) was 4.7 percent, while men’s was 5.0 percent. Both numbers were unchanged from August 2004. In general, women’s unemployment has been around 5.0 percent for most of 2004, while men’s has been hovering around 5.1 percent. In addition, a large number of women workers are discouraged (not counted among the unemployed because they do not believe they can find a job and have stopped looking). This group reached a peak of 3 million (2,977,000) in August 2004, the largest number on record.

Some groups of women have much higher unemployment than others. The unemployment rate for Black women was 8.9 percent in September and Hispanic women’s 7.6 percent, compared to white women’s 4.0 percent rate. Female heads of household have seen their unemployment rate (8.2 percent in September 2004) increase by almost half (44 percent) since their boom-time low of 5.7 percent. (This is unacceptable to Abbasse)

The overall rate of women’s unemployment in September, 4.7 percent, is an increase of one-third compared with women’s lowest unemployment rate in the boom that ended in 2001 (3.4percent).

WAGES
The Census Bureau reported in August, based on the Current Population Survey, that women’s real median earnings fell by $171, or 0.6 percent, from 2002 to 2003, while men’s increased by $336, or 0.8 percent. (The increase for men was not statistically significant, but the decrease for women was.) The gender wage ratio thus fell to 75.5, compared with 76.6 in 2002. The fall in the ratio, in percentage terms (1.4 percent), is the largest in 12 years. The wage gap is now 24.5 cents on the dollar or, $9,944 per year for workers at the median earnings level. (This is unacceptable to Abbasse) The long-term trend of substantial improvement in the ratio of women’s to men’s earnings, for full-time, year-round workers, essentially ended in the mid-90s. Since 1996, the ratio has moved up and down slightly, with no clear direction of change yet discernible. A U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released in October of 2003, controlling for changes in education and work experience over time, concludes that women’s earnings have remained stagnant, relative to men’s, for an even longer period: 17 years, with the gap that cannot be explained by measurable differences in women’s and men’s education and experience remaining at about 20 percent since 1983.

IWPR’s Still a Man’s Labor Market, a report released in June 2004, based on the same data set as that used for the GAO report, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, shows that accumulating the earnings gap across all the years of an individual’s work in the prime working years leads to an even larger wage gap. Across fifteen years (1983 to 1998), women aged 26 to 59 years earn only 38 percent of what men earn, including the years in which they work less than full-time or not at all, for a staggering gap in long-term earnings of 62 percent. It is still women who are doing the lion’s share of family care, giving up substantial working time and earnings to do so, with seriously negative effects on their current income, as well as their retirement security.

CONCLUSION
Based on these recent trends in women's job loss, unemployment, wages, and labor force participation, it is clear that women’s economic status has suffered in the post-recession period. National, state, and local policymaking efforts should continue to focus on promoting policies and programs that are designed to diminish both gender- and race-based economic inequities and to support job growth.

As your State of Michigan’s 28th District Senator, I will work diligently to right these wrongs. Women work equally as hard as their male counter parts and deserve equal pay and benefits.