Who are those guys?
Andy, Bill grandstand about equal pay, but all eyes were on Team USA
The governor and mayor came to lower Manhattan to make sure everyone knows they support the U.S. women’s soccer team’s fight for equal pay.
But it was tough for a couple of middle-aged dudes named Cuomo and de Blasio to compete with Megan Rapinoe’s dope purple hair.
“It’s very lustrous,” said Sebastian Cunto, 11, of Battery Park City, as the violet-maned World Cup heroine leapt up onto a float behind Cuomo’s press conference. “I think it’s great that they were able to win so much while standing up for so many amazing causes.”
Rapinoe even struggled to come up with Gov. Cuomo’s name after thanking de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, at a City Hall ceremony.
“Cuomo, is how I think you pronounce it?” said the captain, correctly pronouncing it.
Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio held dueling press conferences before the ticker-tape parade. But they were far from the stars of the show.
Cuomo heaped praise on the champions’ crusade for equal pay Wednesday — and vowed that New York would no longer tolerate a gender gap in the workplace.
“These 23 champions are banging on the glass ceiling,” Cuomo said as Rapinoe sipped champagne and waved at well-wishers from a float. “And they’re going to keep banging until they break it.”
Cuomo called it “wrong, immoral and unethical” that the women’s team is paid less than the men’s squad.
“They play the same game on the same field and, by the way, they play it much better,” he said. “They are much more successful than the men. There is no rational reason based in economics that they are paid less.”
Flanked by women’s rights advocates sporting “Equal Pay NY” buttons, the governor held up a copies of bills that will tighten rules mandating equal pay for equal work.
The law orders companies to pay the same salaries to women and men who perform “substantially” the same work and another prohibits asking job candidates about salary history, a common tactic for locking in pay inequity.
“Equal pay for equal work is now the law,” Cuomo said.
The pay equity bill was sponsored by a woman, Sen. Alessandra Biaggi (D-Bronx) and shepherded through the chamber by another, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D-Yonkers), the first woman to lead the state’s upper chamber. Ironicaly, neither was invited to the signing.
As Cuomo was speaking, de Blasio set up shop around the corner under a steamy morning sun.
Hizzoner sought to promote his quixotic bid for the White House by promising that as president he would sign an executive order revoking USA Soccer’s tax-exempt status unless it pays the women equally.
“We need to put our money where our mouth is,” said de Blasio, who is polling below 1% in the crowded Democratic field. “The president can do it and as president, I will do it.”’
By then, Megan and her bubbly-quaffing teammates were starting to roll toward the Canyon of Heroes, holding aloft a “B—es Better Have Their Money” placard. And no one was paying much attention to the middle-aged dudes left behind.