On Latina Equal Pay Day, LCLAA Remains Committed to Fighting Pay Gap
MEDIA STATEMENT
October 21, 2021
Contact: Pablo Stein
pstein@lclaa.org | (202) 508-6989
WASHINGTON – As we observe Latina Equal Pay Day around the country, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement’s (LCLAA) reaffirms its commitment to fighting the gender and racial pay gap and highlights the role that unions can play in this struggle by providing fairly-bargained contracts and improving access to healthcare and benefits.
Despite the hard-fought progress we have made towards closing the pay gap, this form of discrimination continues to impact Latina workers in all industries and at all levels of compensation. Even in 2021, the average Latina worker only earns 57 cents for every dollar that her white male counterpart makes and would have to work until today, October 21st 2021, to make what her white male counterpart earned in 2020 alone.
The pandemic highlighted existing disparities as many Latina’s were forced to leave the workforce or take unpaid leave to care for themselves or family. This trend illustrates the broad lack of healthcare and paid leave among working Latinas, which can make it difficult to advance to better paying jobs.
As Latina and Latino trade unionists, we cannot allow a demographic that makes up nearly 8% of our national labor force to be systematically underpaid. We will therefore continue to fight for equal pay to raise awareness of the Latina pay gap among our union siblings and leadership. Likewise, we will energetically work to expand the labor movement by supporting the PRO Act and organizing our fellow workers to bring the benefits of equal pay and union membership to Latinas across the country.
In doing so, we honor the work of generations of Latina workers before us who have challenged the status quo and fought for equal pay, and we pave the way for the generations of Latina trabajadoras who will succeed us.
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The Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA) is the leading national organization for Latino(a) workers and their families. LCLAA was born in 1972 out of the need to educate, organize and mobilize Latinos in the labor movement and has expanded its influence to organize Latinos in an effort to impact workers’ rights and their influence in the political process. LCLAA represents the interest of more than 2 million Latino workers in the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), The Change to Win Federation, independent unions and all their affiliate unions. Visit LCLAA on the web at www.lclaa.org, on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.