Posted on 09/18/2010 1:38:37 AM PDT by reaganaut1
America first put an equal-pay law on the books in 1963, when women earned 59 cents for every dollar earned by a man. While this legislation was landmark at the time, its core provisions require updating if it is to fulfill its promise.
Nearly 50 years later, the wage gap has narrowed by only 18 cents. Despite news reports that the gap narrowed in the last year, the census report released Thursday showed otherwise. Working women are still paid only 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man -- and are paid less than men even when they have similar levels of experience and education. For women of color the gap is larger. During a woman's lifetime, this disparity adds up to a substantial loss in income, retirement funds and even benefits.
In this harsh economic environment, the consequences of the pay disparity put women and their families, as well as our economy, at a significant disadvantage. We are still emerging from the deepest recession since the Great Depression. And while we have added private-sector jobs for eight straight months, we remain short of our goal of putting every American who wants a job back to work. Today, too many struggling families are still waiting to feel the benefits of economic progress.
...
The Paycheck Fairness Act will also improve federal agency access to wage-related data, while protecting confidentiality. When it becomes law, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will have access to important information from employers that, with time and analysis, will strengthen our ability to ensure compliance. The Labor Department will also be able to begin education and outreach efforts that will increase both employer and employee knowledge of their respective responsibilities and rights regarding equal pay.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
34 years ago I "went for" a management position with a financial institution. A song and dance ensued and I was hired as "the girl" in such a way as to hire me, but not in the position for which I interviewed. Later, my boss admitted I was not originally hired in the management position because I was a female. A couple of years later, the feds stepped in and said there were not enough females in management positions within the company.
Voila, suddenly I was management material and was quickly promoted as the first female to obtain the status of management within the company. During the next year my stats were impeccable, prompting handwritten congratulatory notes from the regional supervisor.
There is a lot more to the story...none of it good.
I was grateful for the promotion at the time, regardless of how it came about. Of course I did not know or care about politics at the time and I vehemently oppose government dictating hiring practices and pay scales.
However, to say "most women went for" menial jobs is not really true. Perhaps it was true 50-60 years ago, before those uppity women felt the need to become doctors, lawyers and financial geniuses.
Women were programmed to know their place in society. They were not granted the right to vote until 1920 … no surprise it took another 50-60 years to be “permitted” to break through the "men only club" with employment opportunities.
I’m not disagreeing with anything you said except perhaps the time frame which is actually a rather small point in the overall scheme of things although not for you and others like you. I do firmly believe the laws worked when implemented but change of that magnitude cannot be accomplished overnight. I’m glad you were eventually given your due recognition.
Everything they touch turns to crap. Every “fairness” or “reform” act results in higher prices/fees/taxes, more regulation, and worse service. But hey, at least is FAIR. [/s]
The left is obsessed with equality in everything. They want everyone to make the same salary regardless of the difficulty of the job, the danger in the job, the amount of education needed for the job, one’s skill and competence.
So if a toll collector gets the same salary as a brain surgeon, why would anyone go through all the rigorous training needed to become one? Just take a no-brainer job.
Liberalism is a mental illness.
I do firmly believe the laws worked when implemented but change of that magnitude cannot be accomplished overnight.
As I see it, everything goes to the extreme. There never seems to be a happy medium.
Laws are made to protect children from being horrifically abused, but turns into a parent losing their right to disipline their children. Although, children continue to be horrifically abused on a daily basis.
Laws are passed to end discrimination practices in business. They then morph into government dictating to private businesses who they can hire and how much they must pay them. Were women and blacks discriminated against in hiring practices? Absolutely! However...it turned into discrimination of middle-aged white men.
I think it best to get government out of family and private business!
The left is obsessed with equality in everything. They want everyone to make the same salary regardless of the difficulty of the job, the danger in the job, the amount of education needed for the job, one’s skill and competence.
So if a toll collector gets the same salary as a brain surgeon, why would anyone go through all the rigorous training needed to become one? Just take a no-brainer job.
Liberalism is a mental illness.”””””
There are other factors which the WH & Ms Jarrett deliberately fail to include in the discussion.
IF I have a woman of child-bearing age on my staff & she decides to have a baby, then I have to let her take off for up to 6 weeks & try to run the office without her or find temporary staff to fill that slot. That is after a number of missing hours for visits to the doctor, etc. Telling me to increase the amount of ‘sick time’ I offer in my company is not the answer, either. I am being forced to carry a part-time person at full time pay & all the seniority increases they really have NOT earned.
There is some confusion with people I have talked to as to whether I am required to PAY this employee while they are doing absolutely ZERO to enhance my business. IF I am required to pay them- then I am getting nothing in return & may have to get hit with the pay of the temporary person, also. That affects my bottom line & can spell the difference in keeping the company open for every employee. At the least, I will have to raise my costs to my customers.
IF I prove I can run the company without this person for 6 weeks, I have to rethink as to whether I even need this woman on the staff in the first place.
This is another form of feather-bedding, mixed with affirmative action hiring.
The other side of this whole discussion is that the value of a person’s skills is what makes them a wage or salary.
Paying the JANITOR who has 9 kids the same amount of money as the BRAIN SURGEON who is single & NEVER gets married is an argument I have heard for 50 years.
Telling me that I have to pay the janitor more money because he has 9 kids doesn’t fly with me. That man chooses to be a janitor. He chooses to have 9 kids. His value in the marketplace is not improved or enhanced by the 9 kids he now has to support. He can get a 2nd or a 3rd job if he needs to or he can think harder about bringing 9 mouths into the world to feed. His choices are not my responsibility. Liberals who think so can open their own wallets to do so in their company, but you will not get to apply the same to me without a fight. I would carve back my organization to the bare minimum before I would carry unproductive employees by fiat.
The quality of workers coming out of school today is appalling. They have been told how ‘special’ they are from the age of 4 & the parents never qualified those remarks by saying ‘YOU are special to US- your parents.
The media & the movies & other sources of information about self-worth are equally guilty of failing to explain anywhere along the path from 4 to 24 that your value to others outside of your home is measured by what skills you have, how you energetically apply those skills & what the demand is for those skills in the marketplace of business.
Getting an advanced degree in FRENCH ART & then expecting me to apply that educational effort to the job opening for a front desk receptionist & dispatcher isn’t helping my company at all. We are a construction company—not an art gallery.
IF you have a college education, I would expect to have to give you very little ‘On The Job Training’ to adjust you to the methods my company uses in your job slot. I am not going to pay big bucks for a person that I have to give ON THE JOB TRAINING to from the basics on up. If I advertise that this opening requires an EXPERIENCED person, I expect just that—EXPERIENCE!!! I also am not going to have a new hire get the same pay as a person who has already proved to me that they can show up to work on time, be clean & presentable to customers with the standards I demand, behave according to my company rules pertaining to outside interruptions during your work time (phone calls-twittering-I-Pods-etc). You have not proven to me your ability to put out the volume of work that is expected. You have not proven to me that you are drug & alcohol free, as the standards of my company would require. IF you are a driver of my company truck, you must be able to pass unannounced substance abuse tests which the insurance company & the government requires. I don’t need you if marijuana is your favorite item or you think that drinking is ordinary & acceptable. You had also better have a clean criminal record. I am not running a rehab location- I am running a business!!!!
In other words- can you do the work & WILL you do the work in a manner that shows me you really want this job?
MIX all of the above with this administrations openly advocating “CARD CHECK, which would make every employee a union member & you have a total JOB KILLER.
No amount of “tax breaks” will entice me to hire you.
Everything this NObama group hatches in their evil back rooms is an economy buster for the USA.
Wonder where they all think they are going to be living & working when they have destroyed this country. ???
Sorry if I seemed to have ranted a bit.
This is a sore subject with me.
As a life-long bookkeeper, I know how hard a Mom& Pop business can struggle. All the government levls need to quit choking business on every level.
BTW- San Fran already has a MINIMUM wage of $9.79 an hour- even for a dishwasher.
Obama is smothering working people with oppressive socialist policies while telling them the remedy is more socialist policies. As usual, the useful idiots in the MSM are nodding in agreement.
Wearing your T Party T shirt today? lol.
Jarrett should start by trying to close the gap between generally underworked and overpaid federal employees and those doing equivalent work in the private sector. What do you suppose the chance are of that happening?
There actually IS a wage gap but the truth is that women are paid slightly MORE than men on average for the same work. This has been established for a while now. All this 77 cents on the dollar junk is just that, JUNK! It has not been true for a long time if it ever was.
On top of that women are by far the majority of students in higher education now. First in line to be hired are black women, last in line are white men. A black woman can get a job in South Carolina in a government office before a white man can get in the door to ask for an application.
What this Valerie Jarrett thinks she is doing is beyond me — these people just don’t have any clue about how the real world works.
1. To get people to focus on a different target—it is not the recession, it is now the fault of discrimination
2. By focusing on the unfairness, etc. then she can rally the “oppressed” and get them to go along with her social engineering/social justice, wealth redistribution goals.
Every day! ;*)
The obvious stupidity of the wage gap disparity myth can be illustrated thusly: why would an employer hire a man if for a lot less money, he could hire a similarly qualified woman? It simply doesn’t make any sense.
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MUST read article about the Koch brothers, who are fighting and funding a huge effort against Obama's tyranny, tooth and nail .. and support Americans for Prosperity, the states who are fighting the marxists, and the US Chamber of Commerce, etc., however possible!
(((ARTICLES FROM NEW YORKER CANNOT BE POSTED HERE)))
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VENABLE: Texas fights global-warming power grab Lone Star state won't participate in Obama's lawless policy By Peggy Venable
Peggy Venable is Texas state director of Americans for
Prosperity
The Washington Times
August 25, 2010
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Excerpt:
The state's slogan is "Don't mess with Texas." But the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is doing just that, and at stake is whether the Obama administration can impose its global-warming agenda without a vote of Congress.
*snip*
It has a problem, however, because shoehorning greenhouse gases into that 40-year-old law would force churches, schools, warehouses, commercial kitchens and other sources to obtain costly and time-consuming permits. It would grind the economy to a halt, and the likely backlash would doom the whole scheme.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Chairman Bryan W. Shaw saw the tailoring rule for what it really is: a massive power grab and centralization of authority. They are fighting back, writing to the EPA:
"In order to deter challenges to your plan for centralized control of industrial development through the issuance of permits for greenhouse gases, you have called upon each state to declare its allegiance to the Environmental Protection Agency's recently enacted greenhouse gas regulations - regulations that are plainly contrary to U.S. laws. ...
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These arrogant overlords are in collusion with the unions, and in a pitched battle against the business sector and us, and what business and WE do will determine the ultimate state of this nation: communist commune or a free America, as we known and love her.
LONG LIVE TEXAS!!!
I have always liked the Koch’s.
Pucker up Val, and kiss my ___!
You are forgetting the principal reason behind this.
Valerie Jarrett is an old Obama crony from Chicago and Obama had to find a job for her.
This is her “make-work” position—meddling with the economy for the stated benefit of all womyn.
ping
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