Senate Dems Move on Paycheck Fairness Act

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Senate Dems Move on Paycheck Fairness Act
By: David Dayen Thursday May 24, 2012 7:37 am	Tweet

The next several months will continue to feature message votes from both sides of the aisle and both chambers in Congress, teeing up specific TV ads for the fall campaign. While Republicans have basically passed the breadth of their agenda with message votes, from the budget to social issues, Democrats have been a little more targeted particularly as it relates to the War on Women. They scheduled the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act to dare Republicans to block it. Republicans pretty much obliged. Now Senate Democrats are coming back with the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Five female Democratic senators pressed for legislation Wednesday aimed at closing the wage gap between men and women. The Paycheck Fairness Act would bring up to date the Equal Pay Act, which was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson nearly 50 years ago.

Democrats cited statistics showing that women today are still paid 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, or $10,784 less a year on average. That’s the equivalent of 183 tanks of gas or 92 bags of groceries [...]

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has promised a cloture vote on the pay bill the week of June 4, after the Senate returns from its week-long Memorial Day recess. Republicans, however, have dismissed the effort as political pandering, and the bill is unlikely to pass without GOP support.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being aggressive on this issue. But it brings up another point. To hear it from the Obama campaign, equal pay for equal work has already been made a reality. To a somewhat irritating degree, the Administration and the campaign push the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act as bringing that Valhalla of equal pay to America. But the reality is quite different. Lilly Ledbetter was all about freeing up the right to sue in certain circumstances, when women find out about wage discrimination after the fact. It responded to a Supreme Court ruling. It did not mandate equal pay in any way. And predictably, it didn’t actually bring about equal pay. If it was supposed to make employers fear litigation from female employees, that didn’t work out.

Republicans are now mocking the President for overselling Lilly Ledbetter:

But Republicans say such legislation is unnecessary since the landmark Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is already on the books. President Barack Obama himself has toured the country talking up the Ledbetter Act, which was the first bill he signed into law upon taking office. The law “ensures equal pay for equal work,” he said in Maine this past March.

“I signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, to make sure that all of our daughters have the same opportunity as our sons,” he told the House Democratic Caucus in 2009.

The Paycheck Fairness Act was always the vehicle for bringing equitability in pay across gender. But Democrats made an effort on it in January 2009 and it fell two votes shy in the Senate. They never took it up afterward once Al Franken was seated and Arlen Specter switched sides. Who knows, it could have passed at that point. But the Senate was deep in the health care weeds then. That admittedly narrow period with a 60-vote Senate will go down in history as a missed legislative opportunity.

One Response to “Senate Dems Move on Paycheck Fairness Act”

takingupspace May 24th, 2012 at 9:52 am

One more law is always needed to close a wage gap that won’t close.

The sole driving force behind the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, as well as the oft-proposed Paycheck Fairness Act, is the belief that women earn 77 cents to men’s dollar in the same jobs.

Contrary to what pay-equity advocates want us to believe, women’s “77 cents to men’s dollar” does NOT mean women are paid less than men in the same jobs. Nor does it mean that, even more incredibly in the vein of “men are stronger than women” (which means to many that every man is stronger than every woman), every woman earns 23% less than every man, perhaps leading some of the more benighted and the blindered ideological to believe Diane Sawyer of ABC News earns less than the young man walking back and forth on the street wearing a “Pizzas $5” sign.

The figures are arrived at by comparing the sexes’ median incomes: women’s median is 77 percent of men’s. In 2009, the median income of full-time, year-round workers was $47,127 for men, compared to $36,278 for women or 77 percent of men’s median.

Median means 50% of workers earn above the figures and 50% below. That means that a lot of female workers in the higher ranges of women’s median make more money than a lot of male workers in the lower ranges of men’s median.

“Women’s 77 cents to men’s dollar” doesn’t account for the number of hours worked each week, experience, seniority, training, education or even the job description itself. It compares all women to all men, not people in the same job with the same experience. So the salary of a 60-year-old male computer engineer with 30 years at his company is weighed against that of a young first-year female teacher. Also, men are much more likely than women to work two jobs; hence, more often than women, a man earning $50,000 from his two jobs is weighed against a women earning $25,000 from her one job, so that he appears to be unfairly earning twice as much as she.

Strategically ignoring this over the decades has been less than productive:

No law yet has closed the gender wage gap — not the 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, not Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, not the 1991 amendments to Title VII, not affirmative action (which has benefited mostly white women, the group most vocal about the wage gap – http://tinyurl.com/74cooen), not diversity, not the countless state and local laws and regulations, not the horde of overseers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and not the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act…. Nor will a “paycheck fairness” law work.

That’s because women’s pay-equity advocates, who always insist one more law is needed, continue to overlook the effects of female AND male behavior:

Despite the 40-year-old demand for women’s equal pay, millions of wives still choose to have no pay at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of “The Secrets of Happily Married Women,” stay-at-home wives, including the childless who represent an estimated 10 percent, constitute a growing niche. “In the past few years,” he says in a CNN report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier….” at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka. If indeed more women are staying at home, perhaps it’s because feminists and the media have told women for years that female workers are paid less than men in the same jobs — so why bother working if they’re going to be penalized and humiliated for being a woman.)

As full-time mothers or homemakers, stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living in luxury? Because they’re supported by their husband, an “employer” who pays them to stay at home.

The implication of this is probably obvious to 10-year-olds but seems incomprehensible to or is ignored by feminists and the liberal media: If millions of wives are able to accept NO wages, millions of other wives, whose husbands’ incomes range from moderate to high, are able to:

-accept low wages
-refuse overtime and promotions
-choose jobs based on interest first, wages second — the reverse of what men tend to do
-take more unpaid days off
-avoid uncomfortable wage-bargaining (http://tinyurl.com/3a5nlay)
-work part-time instead of full-time (“According to a 2009 UK study for the Centre for Policy Studies, only 12 percent of the 4,690 women surveyed wanted to work full time”: http://bit.ly/ihc0tl See also an Australian report at http://tinyurl.com/862kzes)

All of which LOWER WOMEN’S AVERAGE AND MEDIAN PAY.

Women are able to make these choices because they are supported — or anticipate being supported — by a husband who must earn more than if he’d chosen never to marry. (Still, even many men who shun marriage, unlike their female counterparts, feel their self worth is tied to their net worth.) This is how MEN help create the wage gap: as a group they pass up jobs that interest them for ones that pay well. If the roles were reversed so that men raised the children and women raised the income, men would average lower pay than women.

Points to ponder:

Why would “greedy, profit-obsessed” employers, many of whom hire cheap illegal aliens to keep labor costs down, pay men more than women for the same work? If employers could get away with that, they would not hire one man, ever.

The power in money is not in earning it (there is only responsibility, sweat, and stress in earning money). The power in money is in SPENDING it. And, Warren Farrell says in “The Myth of Male Power” at http://www.warrenfarrell.org/TheBook/index.html, “Women control consumer spending by a wide margin in virtually every consumer category.” (Women’s control over spending, adds Farrell, gives women control over TV programs.)

“There were fewer cases charging sex-based wage discrimination last year than the year before the [Ledbetter law] was signed, and the wage gap was wider in 2010 than it was in 2007.” -BusinessWeek, May 13, 2012, http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-05-13/obama-pitches-equal-pay-to-win-women-even-as-charges-drop

Excerpted from “Will the Ledbetter Act Help Women?” at http://malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/will-the-ledbetter-fair-pay-act-help-women/