Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Pay Equity topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Advocates press council to prioritize pay-equity legislation after progress on built-environment jobs
Summary
A worker-advocate group told council the city should prioritize pay-equity legislation, citing data that women in Ohio earn about 82 cents for every dollar a man earns and urging city tools to close the gap.
A public-comment speaker urged Cleveland City Council on Jan. 13 to make pay-equity legislation a priority after recent city funding for workforce efforts.
Casey Roach, representing an organization identified in testimony as the Hard-Headed Women, thanked the council for passing funding for the built environment collaborative and said the program has helped put more women into unionized positions. "We know that in a union, a woman makes the same amount as a man," Roach said, and asked council to give advocates tools to apply collective-bargaining approaches to nonunion workplaces to close gender-based pay gaps.
Roach noted statewide statistics cited during testimony: "In Ohio, women make 82 cents that a man makes," and urged council to prioritize legislation that would allow a data-driven approach to closing that gap, especially for Black and Latino women, who the speaker said face larger disparities. The speaker linked pay equity to the city’s poverty trends among younger women and advocated legislative tools to identify and reduce pay gaps.
Council acknowledged the comments; no immediate ordinance addressing pay equity was introduced at the meeting.
