"anti-maternalist unisex feminism"?

Is that what we call pay equity these days?  Now you are blaming women for the lower wages men receive, rather than changes in the global economy and deindustrialization.

So whose to blame according to Michael Lind?  It's urban residents, immigrants, feminists, "Civil Rights Democrats" and a whole list of other criminals attacking the wages of white male workers.

Demands for comparable worth and pay equity are hardly dead, since sexism in the workplace still survives.  And despite your dismissal, legislation and government commissions seeking to rectify the problem continue to exist.  You may not like them, but you are just promoting falsehoods when you say they're dead and buried.

Crazy bugs bunny advocate Hillary Clinton -- who you seem to like -- is cosponsoring the The Paycheck Fairness Act (S.841/H.R.1687)-- which seeks to strengthen the Equal Pay Act of 1963, including requiring 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.

Holy shit:

it is only since the Sixties that many American liberals, inspired by what strikes me as unconscious elite class bias, have preferred the idea of warehousing infants shortly after birth in collective baby-kennels so that their mothers can join their fathers as wage slaves toiling in mostly-unfulfilling  and poorly paid service sector jobs

I can barely even read this guy anymore. But I'll press on...

But these statistics didn't factor out the time that women took off to have and raise children.  When the wages of women and men in the same jobs at the same time were compared, it turned out there was little or no difference in pay rates

You're saying that it's OK for women to get less pay because they have babies?

Stunning.

Shorter Lind:

The staus quo, in which people are financially penalized for having children--or for merely possessing the CAPABILITY to one day have children--should be defended.  

This is acceptable because the people who have children are women.  

This post identifies fairly clearly why it may be a bad idea to endorse the Roberts appointment. Regressive lawmaking that disadvantages women, minorities and labor in general is a common thread just as we are reading here. The only logical response is to reject such regressive thinking.



thepeoplechoose

If a man and a woman both work 40 hours a week at 10 dollars/hour in the exact same job, without taxes or benefit with-holding they both get 400 dollars an hour.

Assuming there is no paid vacation or medical leave (although this probably isn't the case now, it could have been the case 20-25 years ago, although FLMA doesn't require the employer to pay the employee for the medical leave),  and the Woman is pregnant has to go to hospital during work hours to deliver the baby.  The woman would lose 80 dollars of pay for the day she is gone having the baby.  Resulting in a situation where the "statistics" of this admitted hypothetical would show that the woman gets paid 80 percent of what the man gets paid.  Or 320 dollars to the man's 400 dollars. 

That is the point of the statement Lind was making, and yes, in such a situation, women are penalized in the paycheck for having babies while men are not.

Younger readers, used to the Democratic Party of Clinton and Gore and Kerry, may find it hard to believe how appealing technocratic social-engineering schemes like comparable worth and busing for "racial balance" and racial and gender quotas were to much of the liberal left between the 1960s and the 1990s.

Allow me to respond to Mr. Lind in terms that he can understand:

Michael, why do you hate freedom?

Freedom is on the march, and unless you're a blame America first Michael Moore liberal you'll fall in line.

:-)

The next time you wonder why you can't get the majority of Americans to approve universal health insurance reflect upon the fact that you expect them to trust their lives and their health to people who espouse ideas like these.

  "Comparable worth" was a bad idea because it couldn't possibly work and it couldn't possibly work because in an even vaguely capitalistic society there is no measure of what a job is "worth" apart from what employers are willing to give or prospective employees are able to take.
  Not that there wasn't a valid core insight to it.  It would be unlawful to reserve shitty, low-paying jobs for women and good, high-paying jobs for men.  But there was reason to suspect that some jobs were defined as shitty, low-paying jobs precisely because women were doing them.  A common example was the job of "secretary."  At one time, a bright, often well-connected young MAN would become a secretary to some pooh-bah, running chores, drafting correspondence and memos, doing research, all in hopes of some day becoming a pooh-bah himself. The job evolved to the clerical position it is now at about the same time it became a job for women.  Nobody could quite figure out why some "pink collar jobs" paid a lot less than other, superficially similar jobs held by men.
  Quite often, however, it was just a matter of supply and demand.  I'm a lawyer now, but I used to drive a beer truck, and I made a lot more money than the female office staff, even though the skill levels and "worth" of the work weren't much different.  But lots of men could have done the office staff work, and few women could have thrown beer kegs around, so there's a larger pool of potential office staff relative to demand than there is relative to the demand for beer truck drivers.  Now, I make more as a lawyer than I did as a beer truck driver, largely because the number of men and women who could be lawyers is smaller than the number of men (and the statistically insignificant number of women) who could drive a beer truck.
   The idea of comparable worth deserved to die, but simply because it wouldn't work.  No reason to sneer at folks who were grappling with an unsolveable problem.

I must disagree with the usage of the term "dangerous." There is nothing dangerous about simply having a different opinion or interpretation.

Well, the obvious answer is Josh gets to pick whomever he wants.

But I'd certainly like to hear from Lind what exactly a "New Deal liberal Democrat" is. It seems like he's the only one that uses this term.

From everything he's written, it seems that New Deal liberal is just another word for Republican.

If he's a Democrat, I'd love to see a post from him on where exactly his positions differ from Republicans?

Indeed.

Comparable worth as originally proposed totally ignored capitalist market forces. It's pretty much a non-starter in an era of globalization and fierce competition.

That said, there is room for something like it in exceptional circumstances. Government jobs are not generally set by market forces, so discrimination could arise that can't be justified by competitive pressures. Also, within large organizations that promote from within, you could have a situation where entry level salaries are set by the market, but salaries further down the career path are insulated from the market, and contain gender bias.

It is my impression that TPMCafe is not a "liberal" site, but is a site where liberals and centrists who favor Democrats can engage in dialog. I welcome the substance of Michael Lind's contributions, but he could avoid some of the harsh reactions by not using words like "nutty" or "insane" to describe those he believes are wrong, as they serve as fighting words to stimulate controversy.

it is only since the Sixties that many American liberals, inspired by what strikes me as unconscious elite class bias, have preferred the idea of warehousing infants shortly after birth in collective baby-kennels so that their mothers can join their fathers as wage slaves toiling in mostly-unfulfilling  and poorly paid service sector jobs.

The left is for what?  Is this an intuitive conclusion?  I have NEVER heard one democrat saying anything close to this.  An elite bias?  Are you confusing the reality that because of shrinking wages versus a rising cost of living many families need to have both parents working to make ends meet and therefore by us supporting men and women getting eqaul pay for equal work, that we are somehow supporting the breaking apart of the fabric of the American family?  Warehousing infants...baby-kennels?  Living in a land of make-believe democratic positions Mr. Lind?

"Ultimately, society will have recognize that it cannot continue to utterly discount the value of child-rearing"

This is another one of those strange arguments made by the irrational left that I cannot understand. No one discounts the value of child-rearing. But in the case of a parent rearing a child, the value accrues to the parent (and the child, of course). The irrational left appears to believe that someone else should pay the parent for doing this. Perhaps I should also demand to be paid when I prepare my own meals, or clean my own laundry, or drive my own car?

You know, instead of thinking that something is wrong with Kansans, perhaps the left ought to examine the content of their own ideas, with an eye towards how they would be received by people not already committed to that ideology.

Why here? Why have Lind (or Newt) post here? What is the point? Spirited debate? I don't see it, since it's just debate for the sake of debate, mostly noise. I can find out what Lind thinks by reading his books. I guess it boils down to whether one thinks of this site as a debating society or a partisan political site. I always thought it was the later & even though my politics are to the left of Josh Marshall's, I have long enjoyed the civility with which he wrote, first at TPM & now here at the cafe. That civility has carried over into almost all of the discussions at TPM Cafe. Lind strikes me as both ideologically & rhetorically out of step with the themes & purposes of this site, but, hey, it's not my place so having made my views known I'll shut up about it now, though I'll be less inclined to visit as often as I might or to recommend the site to others. Not that I'm vain enough to imagine that the absence of a few hits from me & my friends is anything the cafe management is going to lose any sleep over.

beyond dittoes to what Libertine said.

I would love this

if Josh had Newt Gingrich blogging here

because he's an idea person.

spirited, and sometimes heated, debates

Yes and no. Be honest, we all know the difference between talking points pushers and rigid ideological debaters which are yawns to most us and is precisely the reason we come here to discuss like media savvy people who don't cotton to talking points.

So if Newt came to vigorously debate ideas and thoughts and not talk down to us with the talking points meant for the machine, I think that would be fabulous.

I've seen many rate down insulting far left talking points comments to guests like Larry Johnson, and I thought it was the correct response.

It boils down to: don't come here to insult others' intelligence, whether contributor or commenter?

The only thing wrong with Michael Lind's posts sometimes, mho is an undercurrent of anger at lefty talking points that he's seen in the past that makes him respond with some talking points of his own about people like that. But I see that as reactive, not proactive on his part.

This is another one of those strange arguments made by the irrational left that I cannot understand. No one discounts the value of child-rearing.

The free market isn't exactly family-friendly.  There are plenty of incentives to select non-parents or those parents who do little to no child-rearing (traditionally male) over those parents who do prioritize child-rearing.  We increasingly live in a world where people are expected to work 24-7, no matter what their socioeconomic status.  The reason why we need federally mandated family and medical leave is because we cannot trust the market to provide it without government intervention.

But in the case of a parent rearing a child, the value accrues to the parent (and the child, of course).

There are tremendous positive externalities that accrue to society by having children raised in a loving and caring environment.  One need look no further than the epidemic of "special needs" students from broken families that make teaching such a challenge in many of our public schools.

The irrational left appears to believe that someone else should pay the parent for doing this.

I wasn't proposing the radical feminist proposal of a government "wage" paid to stay-at-home parents (although once we start talking about government-subsidized day care, I think this is not such an "irrational" proposal in comparison).  If you believe that government-mandated family leave funded is having "someone else" paying parents for raising their own children, then I think your issue is reallly with the communitarian center.

Perhaps I should also demand to be paid when I prepare my own meals, or clean my own laundry, or drive my own car.

Those activities don't create any positive externalities for society.  In fact, driving your car creates a boatload of negative externalities, ranging from emission of greenhouse gases to the increased dependence on foreign oil.

You know, instead of thinking that something is wrong with Kansans, perhaps the left ought to examine the content of their own ideas, with an eye towards how they would be received by people not already committed to that ideology

If framed correctly, I think that policies designed to facilitate parents spending more time with their children would actually be quite popular among socially conservative working class voters.  As I recall, Clinton's embrace of the FMLA was quite popular.     

I just posted on this issue (ok, not the time-off thing specifically, but comparable worth) and some related stuff on the economics of discrimination.

Check it out at The Incomparable John Roberts....