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Mary McBroom told us her story at a closed Starbucks restaurant in Detroit. It's one we've heard too many times before: For 18 years she worked hard for her employer, GE before discovering GE cared less about her than she did about the company. Mary was not an unskilled worker: she wired circuit boards, most recently for Chevy Volt charging stations. Hired in 1991, she was a college graduate who had worked her way up in the company from entry level wages to $23 per hour in 2009.

Along the way, she raised two daughters and sent them to college, bought a house, saved for retirement, and did all the things "responsible people" do. Mary is a college graduate with a passion for giving her job her all. Even as she told her story, it was evident that more than feeling angry, she was hurt.

In 2009 GE laid Mary off due to the economic downturn with the promise that there was always a possibility she could be called back. On May 13, 2011 she was called back to the same job she had before the layoff. GE trumpeted the recall as a Big Move, publishing a "Welcome Back" to the eleven employees.

Yet, on her first day back she was told that she was classified as a "competitive wage" employee, and would be paid $13 per hour to do the same work she had been paid $23 per hour to do. She was expected to work alongside co-workers making the higher wage who had managed to get their 20 years of service so they could be considered "legacy employees." Worse, some of the coworkers receiving the higher rate had been hired one week before Mary. Whether they escaped the layoff or there was another reason, the inescapable fact was that employees were working side-by-side doing the same work, but one employee was paid $13 per hour and the other was being paid $23.67 per hour, and everybody knew it.

Mary's shock quickly turned to action, and she wrote to Human Resources in June, 2011 asking them to reconsider her classification and asking about the status of her pension, which was based on years of service and compensation levels. She also wrote a letter to Jeffrey Immelt expressing her concern that she was being recalled to a job she had done well for 18 years, only to suffer a 40 percent pay cut.

GE's response was to send out an investigator to assess the situation without interviewing any of the "competitive wage" employees causing supervisors and coworkers to be hostile to those who complained. In a second letter to Jeffrey Immelt on September 30, 2011, Mary and her fellow "competitive wage" coworkers asked Immelt to intervene and restore her pay to its former level.

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Mitt Romney is not hitting his general election campaign with much aplomb this week. While it's true that he's wildly unpopular with women, that is not entirely Mittens' fault. After all, the whole GOP is wildly unpopular with women, and he's one of them. The leader, in fact. No matter how he tries to pander to women, he'll fail because he hasn't got the first clue what he's talking about.

Take this simple question put to the Romney campaign spokesmen this morning by Sam Stein over at the Huffington Post. It's easy enough: Does Mitt Romney support the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act?

Their answer? Silence. And then..."Um, we'll get back to you on that."

Really, guys? That's just pathetic. There's no other word for it, but then this campaign is pathetic so far. If they can't answer a simple question like that they should just give up on women altogether and soon, because here's the thing. We women have brains, and we don't need to be told what to think or shoved into some weird alternate reality where up is down.

It's pretty straightforward: Women don't like Mitt because Republicans hate women. Doesn't really get any clearer than that, and the only people who have set women back over the past few years happen to have the letter (R) behind their names.

Besides Romney's GOP-ness and his choice of advisors, who I view as being as evil as their Dear Leader Rove himself, there's another reason I loathe him and his campaign. Bob Cesca put it into focus quite nicely earlier this week when he awarded Mitt Romney and his campaign the Most Cynical Ever Award:

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This stuff just writes itself. I've been out of town on college tours with my daughter for the past two days and as I slogged through the mountains of email, these two news alerts were right next to each other. Yes, these things happened on the same day.

That video at the top is President Obama's remarks at the White House Forum on Women and the Economy. Here's a snippet of what he said after making some heartfelt remarks about the impact of women in his life, especially his grandmother and mother.

Now, think about it. When women make less than men for the same work, that hurts families who have to get by with less and businesses who have fewer customers with less to spend. When a job doesn’t offer family leave to care for a new baby or sick leave to care for an ailing parent, that burdens men as well. When an insurance plan denies women coverage because of preexisting conditions, that puts a strain on emergency rooms and drives up costs of care for everybody. When any of our citizens can’t fulfill the potential that they have because of factors that have nothing to do with talent, or character, or work ethic, that diminishes us all. It holds all of us back. And it says something about who we are as Americans.

Right now, women are a growing number of breadwinners in the household. But they’re still earning just 77 cents for every dollar a man does -- even less if you’re an African American or Latina woman. Overall, a woman with a college degree doing the same work as a man will earn hundreds of thousands of dollars less over the course of her career.

Independently of the President's effort, another executive was making some decisions about how important women are to the economy as well, via Huffington Post:

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When these stories come out, I have to laugh. Because women on the working-class end of the economic spectrum have had to work for a very long time. Pay raises haven't get pace with the cost of living, to the point where paychecks aren't worth what they were in the 70s. Women stepped in to pick up the slack.

No, what the Wall St. Journal means is that the sort of women who are married to the men who read the Journal have to work now. (It's a class thing!) But some things remain the same: Women still get paid less.

The composition of the nation's work force is approaching an unprecedented benchmark. Due in part to deep layoffs of men, women are poised to become the majority of workers for the first time. As of September, women held 49.9% of the nation's jobs, excluding farm workers and the self-employed, a rise of 1.2 percentage points from their 48.7% share when the recession began in December 2007. In 1970, women held 35% of jobs.

Deep cuts in male-heavy sectors like construction and manufacturing have left unemployment for men age 16 and over at 11.4% as of October -- a quarter-century high. Joblessness among women is lower, at 8.8%, as employment in female-heavy sectors like education and health care has remained steadier.

There is evidence that women's growing representation in the labor force stems not only from men losing their jobs but from women who previously didn't work seeking employment. Since the recession began, the number of women age 16 and over in the labor force -- which includes both the employed and those who are looking for work -- has expanded by 300,000 to 71.7 million. Meanwhile, the number of men working or seeking work has dropped by 123,000 to 82.28 million, according to the Department of Labor.

"I think we are at a pivotal moment," said Arlie Hochschild, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has written several books on work-life balance. For many households, it used to be that "she worked because she wanted to," said Ms. Hochschild. "Now, she's working because she has to."

Despite households' increasing reliance on the female paycheck, women still earn markedly less than men.

Women are either the sole earner or make as much as or more than their male spouses in four out of 10 U.S. families with children under 18, said Heather Boushey, a senior economist with the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank. Yet the median earnings of full-time working women in 2008, the first year of the recession, fell by 1.9% to $35,745, while earnings for men declined 1% to $46,367, according to the Commerce Department.

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Barack Obama today signed his first bill into law, and boy was it a good one. Is it just me or has this man done more good in eight days than George Bush did in eight years?

Washington Post:

The bill is a response to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that said a person must file a claim of discrimination within 180 days of a company's initial decision to pay a worker less than it pays another worker doing the same job. Under the bill, every new discriminatory paycheck would extend the statute of limitations for another 180 days.

The plaintiff in the case, Lilly Ledbetter, argued that she did not become aware of the pay discrepancy until near the end of her 19-year career at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. plant in Gadsden, Ala.

The Bush White House and Senate Republicans blocked the legislation in the last session of Congress, but Obama strongly supports it and the Democratic-controlled Congress moved it to the top of the agenda for the new session that opened this month.

Full remarks below the fold

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