10:30am EST: Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act!

Posted January 29th, 2009 by Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner

Today I had the enormous privilege of representing you, and all of MomsRising, at the White House to watch President Obama sign the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law. As you know, MomsRising members played a major role in getting this Act passed with their over 150,000 supporting contacts to Congress.

To celebrate, we wanted to let Lilly Ledbetter herself know how grateful we are to her for standing up for all of us, but when we reached out to her, she immediately gave a thank you to you, the members of MomsRising! Here’s a special note, from Lilly to you:

“Thank you for working so hard on this bill to close the loophole created by my Supreme Court case last year. Today is a historic day in the fight for equal pay, and even though my bill passed there is so much work to do. I’m going to keep up this fight and I hope you will join me. Let’s keep up the good work ladies! Together we can win equal pay.” –Lilly Ledbetter

In other words, the best thanks we can give Lilly is to keep up our good work toward fair pay. Passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act reverses a bad U.S. Supreme Court decision that made it impossible to win pay discrimination cases that were filed after 180 days of the pay being set–an important fix to a critical problem, but it doesn’t solve the entire problem of unfair pay practices. We have a long way to go.

Our Congresspeople often hear from us when they do something wrong, but they don’t very often hear from constituents when they do something right! Let’s give a little positive reinforcement to our leaders and ask them to keep up the fight for fair pay!

Tell Congress “thank you” for passing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and to keep up the good work for fair pay:

http://www.momsrisingaction.org/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=26510

*Please tell your friends they can thank Congress too!

Right now women without children make 90 cents to a man’s dollar, mothers make 73 cents, and single moms make only about 60 cents to a man’s dollar. Passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is a great step forward, but we still have a long road ahead of us to reach truly fair pay.

So please take a moment to thank Congress for making this first step forward and tell them that you support continued work towards fair pay for women:

http://www.momsrisingaction.org/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=26510

Thanks!