Rights at Work

What role has litigation played in the struggle for equal pay between women and men? This book explains how wage discrimination battles have raised public legal consciousness and helped reform activists mobilize working women in the pay equity movement since the 1970s. This work explores the political strategies in more than a dozen pay equity struggles since the late 1970s, including battles of state employees in Washington and Connecticut, as well as city employees in San Jose and Los Angeles. Relying on interviews with over 140 union and feminist activists, the author shows that, even when the courts failed to correct wage discrimination, litigation and other forms of legal advocacy provided reformers with the legal discourse - the understanding of legal rights and their constraints - for defining and advancing their cause.