L.A. Rally Asks End to Pay Inequities Suffered by Women, Minorities

From Archbishop Roger Mahony’s prayerful protest against “discrimination in employment” to Mayor Tom Bradley’s admonition to public and private employers to “get your act together,” a coalition of civic and union leaders on Friday called for pay equity for women and minorities and warned that elected leaders will “pay the political price” for ignoring them.

A Pershing Square crowd that Los Angeles police estimated at about 1,000 spent the lunch hour cheering speakers from the National Organization for Women, Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the NAACP and others who excoriated public officials from President Reagan down to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

“There are millions of us, and there are only five of them (county supervisors),” shouted Phil Giarrizzo, general manager of Service Employees International Union Local 660, which has joined two other locals in filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charging the county with sex and race discrimination. SEIU President John Sweeney warned elected officials that they “cannot be neutral. If you refuse to deal with us, be prepared to pay the political price.”

Many in the crowd belong to the three SEIU unions filing the complaint, or to the California State Employees Assn., which sued the state for alleged discriminatory pay practices against 37,000 state workers. Both address the issue of comparable worth, or pay equity, which calls for equal pay for jobs that are different but equally important and require comparable skills. Pay equity proponents argue that jobs traditionally filled by women and minorities pay less than jobs usually held by white men.

In his invocation at the rally, Mahony, Los Angeles’ new archbishop, called racism and sexism “two of the evils which gnaw at our society” and he added that “to remain silent while that equality is denied mars God’s image in each of us.”

And Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the NAACP, roused the crowd by decrying “the high priests of this voodoo movement,” naming among them U.S. Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III and Clarence Pendleton, the controversial black chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission who last year called comparable worth “the looniest idea since Looney Tunes.”

“They’re doing their weird dance, trying to tell us non-equality is equality, discrimination is non-discrimination,” said Hooks.

Eleanor Smeal, president of NOW, declared that although comparable worth issues are being fought “in the courtroom and at the bargaining table, we must show we’re equally ready to fight in the streets and at the ballot box.”

Bradley, whose city negotiators recently agreed to a phased-in pay equity agreement for some employees, said that denying equal worth is “robbing them of a sense of dignity, denying to them that they are equal to their fellow human beings,” which is “as devastating as the loss of income itself.”