Posted on 04/07/2016 12:53:21 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Who is Hillary Clinton pandering to this week? Ah yes… we’re back to the women and the gender wage gap. In her ongoing effort to put some daylight between herself and Bernie Sanders, Clinton is working to shore up her support with female voters and what better way than to promise that everyone will get a raise? (Washington Post)
If she is elected, employers would be required to review employee pay to ensure that women are being paid fairly, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Tuesday.
“I’m going to require that everybody take a look,” Clinton said to applause at a community college event in Brooklyn.
She cited the example of an executive friend, Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com, who was surprised to find pay disparities between men and women at his cloud computing company and pledged to “fix it.”
Benioff would never have known of the disparities if he had not reviewed pay records, and other business leaders are similarly in the dark, Clinton said. She said structural biases and discrimination are partly to blame.
Even while recognizing that absolutely nobody is qualified to read minds or delve into the dark secrets of the human heart, I’m going to call Horse Hockey on Marc Benioff here. If there is a corporate executive out there who isn’t keenly aware of their labor costs, as well as the social unrest surrounding compensation equity questions, they wouldn’t be in charge of a business for very long. That was a transparent PR stunt which was designed to simultaneously improve the brand image of Salesforce and bolster the cause of liberals and Democrats. This whole, “Oh my gosh by golly I had no idea” routine is simply sad.
As for Clinton herself, I await with baited breath the details of precisely how she plans to require employers to review employee pay to ensure that women are being paid fairly. How exactly would that work? Would all private sector employers be required to submit a form with their taxes each year affirming that they reviewed all of the workers’ salaries? (Here’s a hint: they do that already.) Having looked over said salary information, the federal government would next have to establish some sort of rate structure to ensure that the pay was “fair” based on gender. I simply can’t wait to see what that looks like. Will it include seniority at the company as well as years of experience prior to being hired? Pay scales vary wildly from industry to industry, so how will the government structure this new mandatory pay scale? Further, how does Secretary Clinton propose to include factors such as productivity and performance?
The answer to all of those questions is that it simply can’t be done in a competitive labor market, a fact which I’m guessing she already knows. The only option on the horizon is to take away all control of labor costs from private sector employers and develop some sort of Big Brother Department of Salary Assignments, listing every possible occupation in the nation and mandating what everyone should be paid. That’s not too far off from the federal worker system, and we all know how fabulously that works out. But even for government employees, some get larger raises than others based on performance reviews. Perpetually underperforming workers will wind up earning less than top producers, so what happens if they are of different genders? And for the record, if anyone can show us an actual wage gender gap which takes into account the worker’s field of study, chosen career, average salaries for that occupation and performance, please do let us know because it appears to be vaporware.
This is a solution in search of a problem and Clinton doesn’t have any way of quantifying either. It’s more smoke and mirrors to stoke up one demographic subset of voters and try to buy her way into the Oval Office.
How about we stop looking at gender and color, which most companies probably do already, but the Stalinists aren’t satisfied.
The world is one big @#$@#$ing unfair place.
Live with it. Geez, i’m so sick of the b....ing and moaning.
Ok. I’m all for it. I want $300K for every speech I do. It’s only fair ,, right?
And he followed through by reducing the pay of a lot of male workers.
When is she going to address this in her own staff - or when she had a staff in the senate?
But verify legal qualifications for work in this country? Forget it.
Nose on your face.
They pretty much know we ain't gonn'a go quietly as a population .... but as an employee we are more easily corralled.
Under what authority?
Prediction: If the Democrats get solid control of the government again, within ten years everybody’s W2 will be declared a matter of public record, and will be made available, in a searchable database, on the internet.
The money quote, “...it simply cant be done in a competitive labor market...”
Out of 100 ‘on the job’ death, 96 are men. What about some ‘Death Equity’?
a real constitutional scholar that one.....
she can’t require squat.
Is getting paid $500,000 for a 30 minute speech fair?
How are they going to deal with transgenders in this pay analysis? Will they have to be paid based on their birth gender, or by whichever gender with which they choose to identify?
Hey you crazy Democrat - I want to make as much as you do for every speech you make. Damn right I want fairness.
Now if you really suck at the gig you've got...............
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