Latina Equal Pay Day fell on Oct.21 this year. That’s the day when, starting on Jan. 1, 2020, Latina women have finally been paid what white men were paid in 2020 alone. It followed Black Women’s Equal Pay Day on August 3 and Equal Pay Day (averaging all women) on March 24. Latinas are paid 57 cents for every dollar paid to white men, and have to work an extra 294 days to earn the same amount of money. That’s an annual loss of nearly $29,000, and more than $1.1 million over a career. One thing that helps close the gap? Union membership.

The coronavirus pandemic has made things worse. September’s unemployment rate, writes the National Women’s Law Center’s Jasmine Tucker, “means that Latinas are over 1.3 times more likely than white men to be unemployed, and if all the Latinas who have left the labor force since February 2020 returned and were counted as unemployed last month, their unemployment rate would have been 9.3% instead of 5.6%. In September, over one in three Latinas ages 16 and over (36.1%) had been unemployed for 6 months or longer.”