Focus on: Equal Pay
Here’s an excellent column by Amanda Teuscher in Ohio U’s student newspaper which sums up the issues regarding the defeated Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act:
The Feminist’s Corner: Equal pay litigation is justice, not an inconvenience
There’s not much commentary around pointing out that the proposed legislation would have enabled more than just women to have more time to sue for pay discrimination. Any employee with an unequal pay case would have gained the same time extension to enable discovery of the discrepancy and timely litigation, no matter whether the people they were being paid less than were of a different race, ethnicity, sexuality, socioeconomic class or physical ability level.
The major stated objection by the Senators who voted to block the bill was that it would enable “too many lawsuits” seeking restitution for pay discrimination. The idea that companies who behave unjustly and illegally should be forced to provide restitution seems to have entirely passed them by.
When did it become the province of the Government to protect corporations rather than its citizens? This trend of legislation which essentially provides corporate welfare has become rampant in the USA (note the revisions to bankruptcy laws which benefit corporations over citizens yet again). It’s apparently also an emerging trend in other countries where economic conservative politicians hold the legislative power.
Links from FF101 readers to instances of blatant protection of corporations over the interests of citizens in other countries would be greatly appreciated.
Update: A Lurker sent me a link in email to some fine reportage by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate giving more details of the US Republican Senators arguments against the Ledbetter bill, as well as to links of the Majority and Minority Reports from the judgement made by the Supreme Court. I neglected to point out that some of the language used by Republicans just assumes that women are too stupid to know their own best interests. Despicable.
Filed under: discrimination, gender gap, intersecting, op-ed | Tagged: bankruptcy, class, corporate welfare, disability, equal pay, ethnicity, gender, lawsuit, legislation, lily ledbetter, litigation, pay discrimination, race, restitution, sexuality, USA
Wow. The Lilly bill really needed to be passed. It seems to me that the statute of limitations clock should start running at the time you find out, not at the time the discimination initially started. Isn’t the whole danger in a hidden agenda that it’s hidden?
To see our government avoiding the right thing because too many people will seek restitution for the wrong that needs correcting just makes me scratch my head. Well, we’re just going to have to conquer in other ways for now—on my blog for female entrepreneurs, I encourage women to be the boss rather than not. At least that way we can know the boss isn’t messing with our pay. Wow….what a story.
Vicki Flaugher
Let’s say I’m hiring people for contractor work.
One guy says, “I’ll do the job for $20/hr.”
The other guy says, “I’ll do the same job, for $15/hr!”
Who do you hire?
Now let’s say the guy who did it for $15/hr afterwards says, “Wait, I want to get $20/hr for the work.”
What do you think?
Now lets say that the 2nd guy is actually a woman.
If it turns out that women will consistently work for less money, then women will rule the corporate world.
How many men were turned away from the job position, because they were demanding more money than she was willing to work for?
Lion Kimbro, African American men and Latino men are consistently receiving lower wages than White men in virtually any industry you like to name in the USA.
Do African American and Latino men dominate the corporate world?
You left out the other factor people go by: what is the person’s experience which shows that they can actually do the job? If the person wanting $20 has good references but the person wanting $15 does not, the person demanding the higher wage often gets the job. Getting the initial experience which leads to later good references when competing against someone else with no experience often resolves down to irrational preferences.
Your analysis would only work if people actually were the purely “rational actors” that economic theory presumes them to be. People act against their own rational self-interest all the time e.g. voting for the people who promise tax cuts which only benefit the rich when the voter in question will never qualify for them.
Sorry Lion Kimbro, I’ve put your last post into moderation purely on the basis of its length - that was an essay, not a comment. Overly long blog comments stifle discussion rather than encourage it, in my experience.
You have a blog of your own - if you want to post that detailed an argument then post it there and post a link here with a summary of your arguments.
Oh, please excuse me; I didn’t realize the discussion was so lively. Sorry to have interrupted everyone. Please, by all means, carry on your discussion with all the others present here.
Sarcasm’s all you’ve got? Discussion happens here in dribs and drabs, threads sometimes reviving after being moribund for months, and I’m fine with that.
However, the threads that never revive are the ones with really long comments on them. Excessively long comments discourage the participation of others. It’s nothing personal, truly.