| 来源类型 | Article |
| 规范类型 | 评论 |
| Comparable Worth Makes a Comeback | |
| Diana Furchtgott-Roth; Christine Rosen | |
| 发表日期 | 1999-02-04 |
| 出版年 | 1999 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | It’s payoff time for the feminists who have supported President Clinton through L’Affaire Lewinsky. On Saturday Mr. Clinton announced a $14 million so-called Equal Pay Initiative and called for the passage of Sen. Tom Daschle’s Paycheck Fairness Act. “Today women earn about 75 cents for every dollar a man earns,” the president declared, adding that the gap persists because of “the demeaning practice of wage discrimination in our workplaces.” This attempt to codify the discredited theory of comparable worth under another name would be enforced by the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance, the same folks who brought us workplace quotas via Executive Order 11246. Never mind that it is already illegal to pay unequal wages to equally qualified men and women who do the same job. When that occurs, women sue and invariably win. But such discrimination is rare. When adjustments are made for age, experience, education, occupation and position, women earn approximately the same as men. Mr. Clinton’s claim that women earn only 75 cents to a man’s dollar is based on a crude comparison: all women’s salaries vs. all men’s salaries. But the average woman’s salary is 75% of the average man’s because the average woman has less work experience and is more likely to choose a job that gives her the flexibility to combine work and family and to take time out of the work force to bear and raise children. That isn’t discrimination, it’s greater choice for women. The only way to get rid of the average wage gap is to mandate equal pay for different jobs, a practice known as “comparable worth.” That’s precisely what Mr. Clinton seeks to accomplish. Since comparable worth has been rejected in courts all over the country, Mr. Clinton now proposes to enforce it through the bureaucracy. Under the president’s plan, government bureaucrats will “objectively” determine a job’s worth by considering the working conditions and the knowledge or skill required to perform a task. Neither experience nor risk, two factors that increase men’s average wages relative to those of women, are included as relevant job-related criteria. Thus these criteria favor traditionally female occupations over male ones (secretaries over truck drivers), and white-collar jobs requiring education over blue-collar work. The Paycheck Fairness Act would authorize the secretary of labor to establish guidelines for evaluating jobs. In the language of the bill: “The guidelines . . . shall be designed to enable employers voluntarily to compare wages paid for different jobs to determine if the pay scales involved adequately and fairly reflect . . . [these] requirements for each such job, with the goal of eliminating unfair pay disparities between occupations traditionally dominated by men or women.” The Labor Department could decide, for example, that administrative assistants should be paid as much as oil drillers and teachers as much as construction workers. These guidelines are described as “voluntary,” but there is nothing to prevent Mr. Clinton from issuing an executive order forbidding the federal government from doing business with companies that do not adopt the standards. Advocates of comparable worth say that all they want to do is to correct labor market flaws due to discrimination against women. But the president’s initiative is a big step toward an economy ruled by bureaucratic diktat. After all, if the law sanctions meddling with the market in order to achieve “gender justice,” why shouldn’t other groups demand a more equitable distribution also? The wage gap between married and unmarried men was estimated a few years ago at 60% — far higher than the male-female wage gap. Should unmarried men also be considered for comparable worth? While the stated intention of these proposals is equality, they rest on an assumption that women cannot make it on their own. Women are allegedly funneled into certain occupations by a sexist society — a view that flies in the face of feminist arguments that women can do any job. Comparable worth works against women’s interests. If employers had to pay women higher-than-market wages, fewer women would get hired in the first place. Unemployment for both men and women is near a 30-year low; wages and labor force participation rates for women are at an all-time high; and the economy is expanding robustly. The best way to help women succeed economically is to keep the economy strong — something Washington won’t accomplish by giving bureaucrats more power over the market. Ms. Furchtgott-Roth is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Ms. Stolba is a doctoral candidate in U.S. history at Emory University. They are the authors of “Women’s Figures: An Illustrated Guide to the Economic Progress of Women in America,” to be published next month by AEI Press and the Independent Women’s Forum. |
| 主题 | Economics ; Public Economics |
| URL | https://www.aei.org/articles/comparable-worth-makes-a-comeback/ |
| 来源智库 | American Enterprise Institute (United States) |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/236399 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Diana Furchtgott-Roth,Christine Rosen. Comparable Worth Makes a Comeback. 1999. |
| 条目包含的文件 | 条目无相关文件。 | |||||
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