Quote – George Meaney, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

[W]e feel that in a free competitive economy, the task of equal pay to women workers is properly within the province of collective bargaining and not of police action by the government.

George Meaney, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), dismisses the idea of government mandated equal pay law. June 6, 1953. p. From Rights, Not Roses, p. 51. Although the AFL supported the concept during the war, they switched to the opposition column in 1947. This probably had something to do with the dual pay scales common in many unions at the time, which buttressed sex discrimination in the workplace by keeping men and women on separate pay tracts even in many organized workplaces. The smaller, but reliably progressive, Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) consistently supported the push for equal pay, and when the two federations merged in 1955 the new entity adopted the CIO line-probably because polls throughout the 1950s showed strong support for the idea.

Saturday, June 6, 1953