Comparable Worth Still Needed
Michael Lind now blames feminists for destroying male wages and denounces advocates of comparable worth and pay equity as harebrained.
So does he think Hillary Clinton -- who he seems to like -- is crazy and an anti-male feminist for cosponsoring the The Paycheck Fairness Act (S.841/H.R.1687, which seeks to strengthen the Equal Pay Act of 1963?
Along with a range of other measures to strengthen those nasty trial lawyers suing employers, the bill requires the EEOC to analyze salary data in order to show employers how to evaluate jobs with the goal of eliminating unfair disparities.
For more on the bill, see this fact sheet, but here are a few highlights:
The earnings gap between women and men persists across all educational levels...men with just a high school diploma make almost as much ($31,051) as white women who have graduated from college ($32,005)...And while Lind may think the issue of comparable worth is dead and buried, the issue is at the heart of the class action lawsuit moving forward against Wal-Mart based on its practice of routinely paying women less than men for similar work and promoting men over women in a repetitive pattern.
A 2003 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office...found that, even when all the key factors that influence earnings are controlled for -- demographic factors such as marital status, race, number and age of children, and income, as well as work patters such as years of work, hours worked, and job tenure -- women still earned, on average, only 80% of what men earned in 2000. That is, 20% of the pay gap between women and men could not be explained or justified.
There is no question that men's wages have been under pressure for the last three decadesa, but instead of blaming others who were victims of past racism, sexism and discrimination, we should be concentrating on dealing with the corporations whose profits have grown in the last decades.
If you want to know where the "breadwinner salary" went to, it's gone into the stock options of CEOs and capital gains earned by the top 1% of wealth owners who own most of the stock in this country.
Reverse that transfer of wealth to the rich and there's plenty of money to preserve decent wages for ALL workers in our society in a fair and equitable manner.
I think that both Lind and Nate are a bit off the mark. Lind is weaving a few legitimate points into a whole lotta frewfra, but Nate is letting women off the hook for their own initiative. When women started entering the workforce in huge numbers, simple economics suggests that nearly doubled the labor supply, driving down the price of wages. The wages of the men to whom they are being compared to have been driven up either directly or indirectly by Labor unions. Forget the "breadwinner wage" stuff, that assumes management does something out of generosity. The do it because they had to.
But when the women started entering the workforce in numbers starting in the mid to late 70's, when labor had much larger clout than today, women didn't join with unions to better their working conditions. Women seem to want better wages through legislation or the courts where their fathers and grandfathers walked the pickett lines and ate the beans and rice at the union hall to make gains that are still felt in today's economy.
To be fair, labor did little to nothing to organize the woman who were entering the workforce, and with few (though notable) exceptions, labor is still doing little to organize the women.
So Labor dropped the ball, and women are doing little to kick it themselves. So the issue becomes one of big government vs free market, a pretty hard sell on the side of big government.
So that notable exception mentioned above is Stern & Co. starting to emphasize organizing women. That is how comprable worth should be addressed. Organize, create labor shortages to drive up wages (strike!) and the politics will take care of itself. Otherwise this would be a huge loser for dems.
August 19, 2005 11:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Women entering the labor pool also increased demand for labor, namely food service, child care and a host of other work that WOMEN WERE ALREADY DOING. That unpaid labor is rarely accounted for in rants like Lind's.
As for women not joining unions, that's just factually inaccurate. While more men are in unions, the difference in unionization rates is only a few percentage points. There are 6.6 million women union members and 8.9 million male union members, so women are a quite substantial percentage of the union movement.
And the reality is that men dominated already unionized fields, while women were in fields -- outside some like teaching -- where employers resisted new unionization.
But like Lind, you blame the victims of corporate abuse-- women supposedly refusing to join unions and unions failing to organize them. Many of the early comparable worth fights were UNION campaigns, among clerical workers at Yale and in government employment across the country.
Sure, unions could have done more in the past but there wouldn't be millions of women in unions today if they fit the stereotype you're promoting.
August 19, 2005 11:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
Comparable worth as generally stated back in the 1980's was a socialist idea, that people should be paid according to their ability rather than according to market forces. I myself was a socialist back then, but I've reluctantly concluded there will be no viable alternative to capitalism in my lifetime. I agree with Lind that attacking Roberts for supporting capitalism over socialism is a loser for Democrats.
Shifting to what Nathan has written, it is true that large organizations often create their own internal wage structures, and it is possible for gender-based wage differentials to be sustained, not so much for entry level jobs as much as in career paths which develop over time. After the blunderbuss approach proposed in the 1980's was rejected, a more moderate and sophisticated version has evolved. But comparable worth as first envisioned should stay dead.
August 19, 2005 12:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
There is a big difference between the measures in the Paycheck Fairness Act and the radical concept of imposing the comparable worth doctrine on the U.S. economy. You (Mr. Newman) accuse Mr. Lind and your last commenter of blaming the victim, but you offer precious little in the way of an actual defense of comparable worth. As a managment lawyer, I admit I am biased in Mr. Lind's favor but I like to think I have an open mind. So I would be interested in your reasons for supporting comparable worth specifically, as opposed the generic pay equity measures like the PFA. (For example, do you seriously support having the federal government (or judges) set wage rates for every job classification in the U.S.?) To me, the fact that comparable worth is "at the heart of" the class action against Wal-mart is not proof positive of its merit.
August 19, 2005 12:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
While I'm sure there were some people suggesting that the government set wage rates for every job back in the 1980s, that was hardly what most comparable worth advocates were talking about. The problem with most rants like Lind's is they take some part of the debate from years earlier and claim that everyone associated with a concept believed the most radical position.
But let's look at a few articles about comparable worth from the period:
Pretty much sums it up that this was a wideranging debate about pay equity, not some specific proposal. Most of the debate was about institutions like state governments and, in a famous example, Yale University, evaluating its pay system to look for historic discrimination against female-dominated jobs. Which still happens today as unions challenge the low pay of child care and other low-paid workers as deriving partially from denigration of "womens work."In These Times:
But this is the typical rightwing attack--- mischaracterize the argument than attack lots of straw men over and over again, all while ignoring the continuing sexism or other violations to human dignity.
August 19, 2005 12:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
First of Nate, you cite todays figures for women's participation in unions, when figures from say 1978-1986 would be more applicable to the arguement I am making. Also, the growth in woman's participation in unions comes primarily from the growth in government unions, particularly AFSCME who I worked for for years. Lastly, I am not "blaming the victim." I am merely citing cause and effect on the economics of the situation.
As to the new economy of child care or home care and food service, why have these not been organized? Stern is attempting to do so now, but in 1980? Please. The attempts to organize McDonalds were so rare that they usually made the evening news casts.
Corporate abuse is hardly limited to women. Corporations will do whatever it takes to "enhance" their bottom line. They are equal opportunity discriminators. The only ways to fight them are the union and the boycott.
Women do want to join unions in my experience, but from 1978 untill 1998, the major non-government unions were doing to little to teach the women how to organize.
August 19, 2005 2:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
just to mention for the sake of the obvious, if you actually told people, like most americans, that saying someone should be paid according to their ability versus according to what the market would let emploers get away with paying them, if you could explain somehow that this is a socialist idea to most people, you'd get a few million socialists pretty quick.
just thought that'd be worth noting.
August 20, 2005 11:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
Properly speaking, comparable worth isn't about paying people according to their ability, but rather according to the value they generate for the enteprise in question (skills and responsibilities serve as proxies in some enterprises). So it's essentially the same thing as paying commissions to sales workers or stock options to managers -- it aligns pay with value delivered in a way that a job market burdened by generations of non-free-market distortions can't yet do. And I think it would be pretty clear to even someone like Roberts that there's something a little off about paying people in jobs typically held by men 20 cents for every dollar of marginal revenue generated for the enterprise, but people in jobs typically held by women only 15 cents for every dollar of marginal revenue. (Indeed, for people working on commission, those kinds of differential are pretty clearly illegal.)
Not only should good socialists be in favor of comparable worth, so should good capitalists. Whee.
August 21, 2005 7:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
Nathan is, of course, completely right about the actual meaning of comparable worth. Very few people understood it to mean that the government would simply set wages across the board. Rather, it was a set of tools to be used to structure discretionary labor bargaining.
August 22, 2005 10:26 AM | Reply | Permalink