"Equal Pay for Equal Work?" Government Has No Idea What That is

American Thinker ^ | 09/30/2014 | Selwyn Duke

[SeekAndFind]

“Equal pay for equal work!” the mantra goes. “Women get only 73 cents on a man’s dollar!” These are oft-heard slogans, and we may well hear them again during the fall campaign with the War on Women afoot. Now, going beyond the rhetoric, it’s not widely known but nonetheless true that the intersex pay gap is attributable to different career choices men and women make: women tend to choose less lucrative fields (e.g., soft sciences instead of hard ones), work shorter hours even when “full time,” are more likely to value personal fulfillment and job flexibility over money, are more inclined to take time off, generally have less job tenure and more often decline promotions. But while I’ve examined these factors at length in the past, the topic today is something more fundamental. This is that there would be a problem with even a well-intended equal-pay-for-equal-work scheme:

Hardly anyone knows what equal work is.

And the government hasn’t the foggiest idea.

Recently I mentioned how women tennis players now receive the same prize money as the men at Grand Slam events (Wimbledon; and the US, French and Australian opens) and how this is hailed as a victory for “equality.” Yet since the women still only play best of three sets but the men best of five, this actually means the men must work longer for the same pay. Even this, however, doesn’t truly illuminate the issue: what actually constitutes “equal work” in professional tennis?

I’ll introduce the point with another example. The top 10 female fashion models earned 10 times as much as their male counterparts in 2013. Is this unequal pay for equal work? Not really.

[Vigilanteman]

If you want to make a libtard's head explode (especially of the academic variety), point out the adjunct professors almost always do more work than tenured professors in terms of class hours taught, travel, etc. Most of them have few or no amenities such as offices on campus and have to do multiple gigs at multiple campuses for less money.

Suggest they should be paid more as a result of their greater workload.

[Rusty0604]

Pensions should be calculated on the amount of money invested and the investment returns. Anything else is a Ponzi scheme. Only gov’t employees don’t consider that their pensions are schemes because “the gov’t won’t go out of business and the taxpayers can be made to pay for any liabilities”. I spent years on the board of a public employee union pension.

[mjp]

“Equal pay for equal work!”

In a free society with a rational full employment economy, if women believe that their pay for equal work is too low, they should leave their currant job and look for higher paying jobs elsewhere. In the long run, the pay of the jobs they left would go up because of less competition by competant workers, and the pay of the jobs they wanted to change to would go down because of increased competition.In the long run both types of jobs would tend to become more equal.

[ctdonath2]

“Equality. I think that word does not mean what you think it means.”

[DugwayDuke]

If your objective is to be ‘fair and equitable’, as defined by liberalism, then the bureaucrats are the only ones with the wisdom to address these concerns.

If a vocation produces wages that are not ‘fair and equitable’, then that is proof that the market is ‘unfair and inequitable’ and that the wisdom of bureaucrats must be substituted to rectify that. If teachers are predominately female and petroleum engineers are predominately male and teachers are paid less than engineers, then bureaucrats must intervene.

After all, a liberal will tell you, both teachers and engineers spend the same time in college and spend the same resources on their qualifications. Therefore, they are equally qualified and must be equally reimbursed. Small factors like the degree of difficulty in obtaining those qualifications are really unimportant to the liberal mind. Which, BTW, usually will not be found in the engineering fields.

[CommerceComet]

“Equality. I think that word does not mean what you think it means.”

This concept and all social concepts are vaguely defined on purpose. That way they can be asserted anytime a liberal wants a cause to be offended.

[Buckeye McFrog]

If you want to make a libtard's head explode (especially of the academic variety), point out the adjunct professors almost always do more work than tenured professors in terms of class hours taught, travel, etc. Most of them have few or no amenities such as offices on campus and have to do multiple gigs at multiple campuses for less money. Suggest they should be paid more as a result of their greater workload.

sssshhhhh! They're already forming a union.

http://adjunctfacultyassoc.org/

[Vigilanteman]

If it will work anywhere, it will work in the 'Burgh. Not only is this town union friendly, but there are a slew of universities using adjunct professors.

Other places where there is a huge mismatch between supply and demand, I'm not so sure.