One year ago, Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law, ensuring that workers can go to court to protest pay discrimination. Now it’s time for the next step.

For almost twenty years, I got paid less than my co-workers. I was a woman doing the same work as the men on my team — and apparently, my gender was all the excuse my employers at a Goodyear tire plant needed to cut my paychecks. My salary was far lower, and I got lower raises – over and over again.

But one year ago today, to my amazement, the President signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law, which restored the law to make sure workers can go to court to protest pay discrimination.

And now it’s time for the next step. The right to go to court is important, but it isn’t enough. We need to do more to keep women from being discriminated against in the first place.

We need to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. This bill gives teeth to the protections against pay discrimination. And women, who are still shortchanged in the workplace, deserve just that. The bill would empower women to negotiate for equal pay, create stronger incentives for employers to follow the law, and strengthen federal outreach and enforcement efforts. It would also strengthen penalties for equal pay violations.

But from where I sit, one of the most important aspects of the Paycheck Fairness Act is a provision that would prohibit retaliation against workers who ask about employers’ wage practices or disclose their own wages to co-workers. This would have been particularly helpful to me, because Goodyear prohibited my colleagues and me from talking about our wages. This policy delayed my discovery of the pay inequities between my male counterparts and me by — literally — decades.

For the past year, I’ve been speaking out to build up support of this bill, with the help of my friends at the National Women’s Law Center.

The bill has already passed the House, and now it’s up to the Senate. It is time to improve the law, not just restore it. You can count on my continued commitment to passing this Act and to ensuring that women will some day, as the President called for in his State of the Union, truly have equal pay for equal work.

About the Author: Lilly Ledbetter is a volunteer and mother of two. She resides in Jacksonville, Alabama.

A woman who was eight months pregnant was asked to leave her job because, according to her boss, her pregnancy “didn’t look right for the company.” Another woman suspected she was not hired after explaining to her prospective employer that the gap on her resume was because of time she needed to care for her ailing mother. A man was fired after asking for a few extra days off of work to care for his wife who was recovering from surgery.

Most American workers have families to care for and most American families rely on parents and others to provide essential income. Yet our workplaces have not caught up to this reality and often subject workers to unfair treatment because of their family responsibilities. Too many working parents and caregivers, especially those with limited income, lack access to lawyers and know little about their workplace rights. At the same time, studies have indicated that nearly one in five employers is out of compliance with the Family and Medical Leave Act, the only federal law designed specifically to address the issue of work/family integration. Workers with families need assistance navigating the legal labyrinth of the workplace when they encounter discrimination or are faced with a family health crisis.

A Better Balance: The Work and Family Legal Center and Outten & Golden LLP, the employee-rights law firm, are teaming up to help. A Better Balance is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting equality and expanding choices for men and women at all income levels so they may care for their families without sacrificing their economic security. Outten & Golden LLP, is a national preeminent employment law firm dedicated to empowering employees and protecting their civil rights in the workplace. It is also one of the first and only firms in the nation to have a practice area dedicated to Family Responsibilities Discrimination.

Together, these two New York City-based organizations have launched a free legal clinic to provide information and advice to workers with family responsibilities about their workplace rights. The clinic grows out of a project at A Better Balance that was created to extend work/family advocacy to a segment of the workforce that faces stubbornly inflexible work hours and whose economic security is easily endangered by a family crisis. These workers are often forced to choose between their jobs and their family’s well being; for them, a sick child or family emergency can mean the difference between just scraping by and tumbling into poverty. No one should have to face such an impossible choice.

As part of the Families @ Work project, employees can now access a Guide to Your Rights at Work for workers with family responsibilities, which outlines common questions and answers about working while pregnant and while caring for loved ones. Attorneys from A Better Balance and Outten & Golden LLP are also conducting trainings for workers, lawyers, social workers and others to help them understand the scope of the law and the protections available for families at work. Individuals in the New York City area who suspect they may have been treated unfairly at work because they are pregnant, or had to take time off to care for a sick child or other relative, or for any other family-related reason, are encouraged to call the Families @ Work Legal Clinic hotline at 212-430-5982 to set up an appointment with a lawyer.

About the Author: Phoebe Taubman is an Equal Justice Works Fellow with A Better Balance: The Work and Family Legal Center, which fights to give American workers the time and flexibility they need to care for their families without risking their economic security.  She leads a project to expand work/family advocacy to low-income New Yorkers by empowering and educating them about their rights to be free from workplace discrimination based on caregiving responsibilities.  Prior to joining A Better Balance, Phoebe served as a law clerk to the Honorable Faith S. Hochberg of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey in Newark and as a litigation associate at Mayer Brown in New York City.  Phoebe is a member of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on Women in the Profession.  She is a graduate of Harvard University and of Georgetown University Law Center.

I once ran an online contest asking a very simple question—what is your biggest complaint about work? The responses flooded into Costco.com and were not at all what I’d expected.

I was totally prepared for a ton of responses about low pay, disrespect, poor working conditions, etc. Actually more than half of the responses all touched on the same topic—people who steal food from the company refrigerator. I couldn’t make this up. At first I thought that they’d all come from the same company. But as I read through them I realized they all had different details.

Choosing a winner from all of these tragic cases of lunches lost was a challenge. Until I came across the most painful and pathetic story. This poor person described how her lunch thief not only ate your lunch, but they managed to rub your face in what remained.

She described in painful detail about how her thief opened a box of chicken wings, ate half of them and then carefully put the bones back in the box and resealed the container. Ouch.

Besides being thankful that you don’t have to work with this person, why should you care about this isolated case of cruelty?

Because when it comes to our jobs the big stuff—not getting a big promotion, having a really tough competitor, not feeling like your work is appreciated—fades in comparison to the little annoying stuff like people stealing your lunch. I call it the pebble in the shoe vs. getting hit by a boulder rule. Over time the pebble drives you the craziest.

Don’t believe me? There was another study that asked what is your biggest complaint at work? The number one response? It’s too cold. Wanna guess the second most common complaint? Yep, it’s too hot.

Granted this study was done by the International Facility Management Association, but it does point out that power of the little annoyances can have at where we work.

What is the moral of this story? Management tends to focus on the big stuff in those rare times when it focuses on employee morale. Issues like bullies, food thieves and temperature are not the kind of stuff that most managers think of when they focus on employee satisfaction. Yet these are the very issues that are wearing down your people.

I’m not discounting the big stuff. I’m just trying to shine the spotlight on the little annoyances that have a big impact at work.

Lest you think I’m making a mountain out of a molehill here. I recently saw a remarkable survey from the Conference Board. They asked employees in 1995 if they were satisfied at work. 61% said they were. The survey was repeated recently. The number of satisfied workers has dropped to 45%.

About the Author: Bob Rosner is a best-selling author and award-winning journalist. For free job and work advice, check out the award-winning workplace911.com. Also check out his newly revised best-seller “The Boss’s Survival Guide.” If you have a question for Bob, contact him via bob@workplace911.com.