For Women, Economic Justice a Civil Rights Issue

Written by Maya L. Harris for CNN, January 21, 2015.

Excerpts of article are below. Read the full article here.

“What good does it do to be able to eat at a lunch counter if you can’t buy a hamburger?” Martin Luther King Jr. asked almost 50 years ago.

As we celebrate King’s birthday, recall the historic struggle for equality and reflect on the progress we’ve made, we can’t forget that a basic tenet of the movement King represented was one of economic security.

For millions of American women and their families — especially women of color — the aspiration of equal rights coupled with full economic opportunity is far from realized.

Today, one in three Americans lives at or below the poverty line, and almost 70% are women and children. That’s 42 million women inching along poverty’s tightrope. The number of working poor struggling to lift themselves into the middle class is steadily increasing, with the worst poverty rates falling on black and Latina women.

A new report just released, The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink, illuminates this economic plight that is seizing millions of American women but is frequently overlooked in our national discussions about poverty and inequality.

Women represent nearly two-thirds of minimum wage workers, concentrated in jobs that tend to be labor-intensive. They go without paid sick days or access to affordable child care. Moreover, women across the spectrum continue to earn less than men no matter the education level, profession or position — a wage gap that is more like a gulf for women of color who earn 55 to 65 cents on the dollar compared with white men.