Word on the street is that the Senate will take up ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, today. Word on the street, also, is that the bill currently has 59 votes in favor; in today's dysfunctional Senate, every bill needs 60 out of 100 to pass. That's why we have tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page -- so we can all call our Senators and tell them to pass ENDA. I've run down more than a few "criticisms" of ENDA, but Equality Matters provided a pretty fantastic summary of them all right here back in July, and you can refer to it when you call your Senator. You know, so you can say "ENDA doesn't do this, either." We already know ENDA doesn't create "special rights" for gays in the workplace and doesn't hamstring bosses from enforcing dress codes and the like (and should we even have to mention that here in the twenty-first century?), but the bill doesn't "hurt religious freedom," either, because one in America has the "religious freedom" to treat their gay workers worse than their straight ones.
Meanwhile, if you haven't already told the SEC to force corporations to disclose the ratio between their CEO's pay and their median worker pay, Sum of Us still helps you do that. The SEC has apparently written a pretty strong rule that doesn't allow corporations to (for example) exclude its foreign or part-time workers from pay calculations, because excluding such workers would make a corporation's median salary seem higher than it really is. Naturally the big corporations hate it the way vampires hate sunlight. Are they afraid that investors won't want to invest in corporations that pay their CEOs too much? Perhaps they should be -- just as they should be afraid of investors finding out that some corporations out there do very, very well, without allowing their CEOs to gild their plumbing while paying their workers in dung pellets. And hello! The law doesn't mandate salaries; it mandates disclosure of salaries. I'm old enough to remember when disclosure was the conservative position.
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