Posted on 02/19/2017 3:00:17 PM PST by nickcarraway
In a letter criticizing a bill that addresses pay gap in the workforce, a Utah Republican said that men have traditionally earned more than women and, citing "simple economics," argued that things should stay that way.
James Green's letter to the editor, published in two local publications earlier this week, immediately prompted such outrage that within two days, Green had written an apology and resigned from his post as vice chair of the Wasatch County Republican Party.
Green said in his letter, published Wednesday by the Park Record and the Wasatch Wave, that men make more than women because they're "the primary breadwinners" of their families, and paying women equally would somehow ruin the makeup of a traditional family where "the Mother" remains at home raising children.
"If businesses are forced to pay women the same as male earnings, that means they will have to reduce the pay for the men they employ, simple economics," Green wrote. "If that happens, then men will have an even more difficult time earning enough to support their families, which will mean more Mothers will be forced to leave the home (where they may prefer to be) to join the workforce to make up the difference."
And having more women in the workforce would create competition for jobs, "even men's jobs," Green wrote. That will, in turn, lower the pay for all jobs and force "more and more Mothers" into the workforce, he argued.
That's "bad for families and thus for all of society," Green wrote. "It's a vicious cycle that only gets worse the more equality of pay is forced upon us. It's a situation of well-meaning intentions, but negative unintended consequences."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Finally!
Wonder how long it will be before as many people are on board with this as have finally realized that the media are scumbag liars.
I don’t presume to know Mr. Greens motives. I do know idiocy when I see it
You never answered my two questions
He does address a real problem.
Many men have a hard time earning enough to permit their wife to stay home with the children.
In 1961 when I was born it was common place for wives to stay home to run the house hold while the man of the house earned the daily bread. My father supported 6 children on about $6k a year. Now you would be hard pressed to do that on $100K.
Sure there is inflation factored in to those numbers but there is also a huge increase in government.
In 1961 taxes (Federal State and local) took for about 20% of the working man’s income. Today it is well over 50%.
The solution to women being forced in to the work place is not paying men more but in men paying government less.
I'm in agreement with your reasons. And I have other reasons. I believe in equal pay for equal work, but not equal pay for women versus men. It depends on the situation.
In my experience, many women underperform versus men. They'll get male co-workers to do the heavy lifting. An exception is where upper body strength and dirty work is not a factor, and then your reasons kick in. Women can and do outperform men if it's a desk job. Otherwise, they don't want to get their nails dirty and simply can't do the heavy lifting, but they demand equal pay for underperforming versus their male co-workers. I've worked with some excellent female engineers who do good work. But I've also worked with some female workers who simply are not cut out for the work, but bosses don't hold them to the same standards as men.
There are more women in the law & med schools and other professional schools than white males. This trend has been going on for 20 yrs. The tradional family is on the decline. Law not needed.
Something like that has been going on since the seventies.
Just jumping in here. I'd suggest a single woman should be paid whatever her employer thinks her work is worth, and it's none of the Feds' business whether it's the same as some man is getting or not. That power is not delegated to Congress in the Constitution, so ta-ta EEOC. Some idiot state constitution could take up the nanny-state slack there, and many now do, but let those states compete with the others with different laws instead of Big Brother fixing the game, and let the best state win.That was the Framers' plan, and it was the best one.
The market will discover the truth of what our daughters should be paid, if they choose to apply here or there. Whose work is exactly comparable to anyone else's work, anyway? Encouraging the state to put its thumb on the scale in situations like this is the prescription for family destruction, as others point out--but in the best case, it's the occasion for bureaucracy, butt-covering, delay, expense, and incompetence in the best case, as everyone in the situation, from the boss to the management to the worker herself, tries not to be sue-able.
This is one of those situations where there's a problem, therefore the Stalinists have an irrelevant solution that happens to be designed to blow up the family (which, like the Church, is an enemy they fear), which is the real point, and their only answer to anything.
Uh, no!
Elizabeth Warren made sort of the same argument in her book The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke” (2003)
Of course she does not make the argument that women not work or that women should be paid less, but she does make the case that women entering the workforce upped the ante for everyone in terms of what income it takes to have a middle class lifestyle. She also argues it got rid of a safety net that middle class families had (that in a pinch the wife could take on a job to smooth out the rough spots). With 2 income families, people spend the total of what they make (and then some going into debt) so that if one of them gets sick or loses a job the family finances are in big trouble.
It’s a very logical thesis but she doesn’t ever talk about it now, it would be too politically incorrect.
Add to that, in a macroeconomic sense it shifts the supply-demand curve to increase prices: particularly for big-ticket family friendly items like (back then) station wagons (now vans), and homes.
Compound that by the emergence of credit (including 30-year mortgages when they used to be 7 years)...and a LOT gets priced out of reach for the single breadwinner family.
All by design: and yet indirectly so the oh-so-clever plotters can posture "Who, ME?" when called on it.
Work of equal value should get equal pay, period. If an employer wants to do it differently do not take or keep employment with him.
If a woman gets the same credentials and puts in the same amount of time as a man,”””
TIME is the wrong standard.
PRODUCTION is the correct standard.
We all know people who can ‘put in their time’-—but cannot do the work.
Unless the work situation is making parts, which can easily be counted & a day’s production ascertained, it is very dificult to get a fair comparison.
If women out there think they are worth the exact same pay as a man-—go apply for a UPS truck driving job, delivering packages.
When you have put in a couple of years doing that, you MIGHT be doing equal work.
There are many times I got pissed off watching women underperform, while I did the heavy work, from my youth up through my retirement. If they can't do the work, they should be paid less than men or simply get kicked off the job.
For instance, while I was in the IT profession as a senior engineer I had to scope out electrical requirements for all the equipment going in arrays of cabinets, install equipment cabinets and computer components, pull wiring under the floor between cabinet arrays and such. While doing so, another woman engineer who had been given the same title as mine but did practically nothing (given the title because a boss elsewhere was her husband), would interrupt me and ask me to set up a display monitor, keyboard and mouse on a rolling cart for one of the computer servers in another rack. Told her to do it herself, she said she didn't know how. Give me a break, even the lowest techs getting 1/3rd the pay could do that. But I didn't want to anger her boss husband.
Many other similar situations happened with other female co-workers. They got the perks without doing any heavy lifting, and relied on same-pay co-workers to do their work for them. Even if they put in a couple years, they still can't perform.
If women out there think they are worth the exact same pay as a man-—go apply for a UPS truck driving job, delivering packages.
When you have put in a couple of years doing that, you MIGHT be doing equal work.
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This is a valid argument? Silly.
I own a bread route. Try getting up at 2am and going to a depot that is over 100 degrees in the summer. When you get there you can spend 2 to 2.5 hours in the heat pulling your order. My average load is between 1200 -1500 pieces per day.
When my order is done, I get to load stacks of bread that are around 6 feet high into my trailer, after I unload the empty stacks from the day before.
After that is done, I get to start my deliveries by dragging those stacks across the parking lot into the stores, and unstacking them piece by piece so I can get checked in and paid. The easy part is putting everything on the shelves.
So, don’t tell me about hard or equal work. There are plenty of woman that do harder work than a UPS or Fed Ex driver, and they manage to do it without having the strength of a man.
BTW, I’m a pretty small woman, 5’4, 110 lbs, so it is much harder physically for me than any man doing the same job. I just work around my limitations. For instance, I can’t stack my bread 8 feet high like the men do, but that makes more stacks for me to load and unload.
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