‘Comparable Worth’ Rears Ugly Head in the Age of Obama
Ronald Reagan called the government scheme of determining pay structures for private industry a "cockamamie idea."
Nevertheless, the comparable worth movement marches on. Comparable worth, as Clegg explained in a recent AEI publication, is not really about actual data, but about subjective views of those who contend certain jobs should be paid more. He wrote:
[W]hat comparable worth is about is the government requiring that a man doing one job and a woman doing another, different jobs be paid the same amount, on the grounds that, in someone’s opinion, the two different jobs have “comparable worth.”
Two versions of comparable worth that been rattling around Congress for some time would impose this arcane system of government-controlled wage “fairness” on employers: the Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act. The latter passed the House earlier this year. It drew criticism even from the Washington Post, which explained:
The Paycheck Fairness Act contains some reasonable measures, such as protecting workers from retaliation if they question pay structures. But it also potentially invites too much intrusion and interference with core business decisions. For example, the new bill allows employers to defend against lawsuits by proving that pay disparities between men and women were based on “bona fide” factors, such as experience or education, and that these factors are tied to business necessities. Fair enough. But the bill also says that this defense “shall not apply” when the employee “demonstrates that an alternative employment practice exists that would serve the same business purpose without producing such differential and that the employer has refused to adopt such alternative practice.” But what if the employer has refused because it has concluded that the alternative is, indeed, more costly or less efficient? What if the employee and employer disagree on what the “business purpose” is or should be?
The idea behind the Paycheck Fairness Act is to tangle employers in endless rounds of litigation. Each and every employee would have a ready-made lawsuit if she could identify some job — even one in a different field or held by more experienced workers — which paid more than hers.
The bill is now sitting in the Senate. Some speculate that with the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which reversed a recent Supreme Court case and in essence abolished any meaningful statute of limitations on claims under the Equal Pay Act, the heat will be off to move forward on comparable worth.
But that may be wishful thinking by those who underestimate the Obama administration’s desire to manipulate the free market system for its desired social ends. After all, if the government can decide which cars GM will build, which bank CEOs can keep their jobs, and what bonus is “too excessive,” there is little to prevent it from reaching into the workplace in the name of “gender equality.”
And liberal women’s groups are already agitating for more action from the Obama administration. So it would be quite understandable if the president would take up this cause, particularly as other agenda items stall and his special interest supporters lament the lack of progress on everything from card check to cap-and-trade.
The Obama administration is certainly sympathetic to the notion that the free market is “broken” and that compensation is somehow not subject to competitive forces. So it would, in some ways, be entirely natural for them to take up the cause of “finally fixing” gender inequality in the U.S. The result would be a gift to the trial lawyers — but, come to think of it, rewarding a favorite Democratic political ally would only add to its allure.
Those who fear further politicization of the economy and the spread of rampant litigation should remain vigilant. Comparable worth is a bad idea which may find a willing advocate in the current administration. It is a bad idea that might just have found its time.
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Jennifer Rubin is PJM's Washington, DC, editor. She also blogs at Commentary’s Contentions.
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30 Comments
1. David Thomson:“For example, the new bill allows employers to defend against lawsuits”
This is outrageously expensive—especially if the plaintiff is getting free legal assistance from the government. Employers often have to cave in regardless of the merits of the case because of the staggering financial costs. The doctrine of unintended consequences should never be overlooked. I also strongly advise everyone to learn about the disastrous 1971 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Griggs vs. Duke Power. There are estimates that over the last 38 years it has cost the American economy over three trillion dollars. Well-meaning judges ordered companies to prove that their employment tests were not biased against minorities. Sounded pretty good. Alas, they forgot that we live in the real world. The top executives and their attorneys realized that the door was now open to countless and never ending lawsuits. How to get around this madness? They decided to require applicants possess the minimum of a four-year college degree. No longer could the mere high school graduate apply for the job even though they could easily pass the tests. And ironically it is often minority candidate that get hurt.
Apr 12, 2009 - 5:35 am 2. Morry Rotenberg:The perennial question, how much is a man’s (or woman’s) time worth? Should a ball player make $5000.00 per pitch? Should a ditch digger make $10.00/hour? If anyone could pitch it wouldn’t pay $5k. If there weren’t enough people willing to dig ditches for $10/hour then the price would go up. But how do you compare these two jobs? The market knows how. The only people who think that they know how are the same deluded folks who think that they can somehow change our weather.
Apr 12, 2009 - 7:04 am 3. David Levavi:David Thomson:
…They decided to require applicants possess the minimum of a four-year college degree…ironically it is often minority candidate that get hurt…
No problemo. Continue to lower college admission requirements for those deemed more equal by the government through affirmative action. Broaden the practice of grade inflation (already widespread, although erroneously believed to exist only in the best of schools).
An American college degree today in anything but science or mathematics can be achieved by any brighter-than-average chimpanzee. The Obamas and the Jeffries of this world can be stellar academics without ever producing a scholarly paper.
The core issue is standards. The leftist levelers are a crude lot and have none. In a meritocracy, community organizers and harebrained racialist theoreticians don’t count for much.
Apr 12, 2009 - 7:27 am 4. David S:This seems far fetched – but a bump in the minimum wage could be in the works once recovery has taken hold. Maybe even one indexed for inflation.
Peace.
DS
Apr 12, 2009 - 7:37 am 5. The Historian:THE FREE MARKET VS. THE ASH HEAP
There never has been a Socialist utopia and there never will be one.
http://greensrealworld.blogspot.com/2009/04/capitalism-not-socialism-will-light.html
Apr 12, 2009 - 7:38 am 6. TexEd:Comparable worth is not a “bad idea;” it is just a mechanism to give control to unions. The way it works is this, you break a job into components and then assign a value to each component, total up all the values and that becomes the value of thee job; the amount you pay the one who holds the job.
Apr 12, 2009 - 8:19 am 7. Marge:When you allow a grievance to be filed on the “assign a value to each component” step, you turn each job valuation into a political exercise. This will result in every job moving toward the highest valuation and turn a company’s wage structure into an eternal administrative process.
It will shift establishing wage structure from market place influences to union whim.
Well now reagan was cockmamie his self. So what do you expect. After all the down fall of our financial system started with reaganomics and his wonderful wonderful tax cuts. But since he was ill even before his first term we can sorta overlook some of his decisions, the ones that the crew who overwhelmed bush cheney, rumsfield etc was in his cabinet even back then.
Apr 12, 2009 - 9:16 am 8. David Thomson:“And ironically it is often minority candidate that get hurt.”
Oops! Let me do this again: And ironically it is often the minority candidate that gets hurt.
Companies have to worry about the financial costs of being sued by the government with its virtually unlimited resources—and also the slime jobbing MSM. They cannot ignore the awful costs of bad publicity, which can do enormous damage to their brand name. Our larger corporations have for decades been intimidated into embracing the political correct goals of the “elites.” It has now evolved to the point the citizenry must be legitimately concerned that the American economy is rapidly becoming fascist.
Apr 12, 2009 - 10:00 am 9. Войска ПВО:Oh dear, Marge is back and it appears she is off her meds. It might be nice if you laced your eructions with a few citations and some evidence of scholarly research, sweetie.
Apr 12, 2009 - 11:11 am 10. Ex Canuck in USA:Canada has had this for years under the rubrick of “equal pay for work of equal value”. Its a great job creation strategy for government workers who supervise these programs. But its a death knell for small and medium size businesses who rather than retaining staff to interact with the government, will simply cut the numbers on the payroll to avoid complications.
Should be avoided in the USA at all costs.
Apr 12, 2009 - 11:14 am 11. ic:In Mao’s China in the 50’s and 60’s, a nurse (my aunt) made as much as a doctor (my uncle). My aunt was on the board to determine wages and found she, an experienced nurse, was as qualified, if not more qualified, as a doctor.
Btw, Ex Canuck, have you ever had a nightmare that you were chased, and tried to run but couldn’t, you woke up in a sweat? Well, run some more, there is nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, and you won’t wake up from this nightmare. We are all in it.
It’s a damned shame that we give up our rights and freedom so easily just because of a lousy recession.
Apr 12, 2009 - 11:39 am 12. David Thomson:“But its a death knell for small and medium size businesses”
A fascist society inherently declares war on small to medium size businesses. It prefers to work with major corporations. This makes things a lot less messier. Also, if nothing else, the politicians who attended the “elite” schools have more in common with the typical top business executives. Please note that our last four presidents attended either Harvard or Yale—and all of them favor big government responses to our nation’s problems.
Apr 12, 2009 - 12:01 pm 13. TurfMonster:Hey Marge! How do you explain the Equal Pay Act of 1963?
Do facts ever enter into your analysis, ever?
Apr 12, 2009 - 12:05 pm 14. Moogie:#3 David Levavi: Good analysis. I think “meritocracy” leads to “mediocrity,” which, of course, it the natural evolution of socialism, isn’t it? And we all know, by now, that socialism is the goal here – not fairness or equality.
Any person with half a brain knows that socialism does NOT produce equality.
Affirmative Action does not produce equality.
Comparable worth does not produce equality.
Once again, what we see here is the liberal influence of “good intentions” which invariably produce bad results.
Apr 12, 2009 - 12:40 pm 15. therealist:This will affect everyone in a company. Consider the following scenario. Your boss comes to you and says he has to lower your salary. Not because you are a bad employee, in fact, you are the best one he has. But you are also the highest paid and throwing off the average. To make matters worse, you are not a minority and you live in a good neighborhood and drive a nice car and that’s making the other employees jealous. You threaten to go to the competitor, but they have also just implemented salary bands too. You decide that maybe its just not worth it working so hard and resolve to do the bare minimum from now on.
Apr 12, 2009 - 2:27 pm 16. Войска ПВО:4. David S writes:
“This seems far fetched – but a bump in the minimum wage could be in the works once recovery has taken hold. Maybe even one indexed for inflation.”
You are absolutely, 100% correct, David S., it does seem far-fetched.
Apr 12, 2009 - 3:25 pm 17. Bear:“It’s a damned shame that we give up our rights and freedom so easily just because of a lousy recession.”
Isn’t that what the dems said about the Iraq War?
Apr 12, 2009 - 4:30 pm 18. David Thomson:“It’s a damned shame that we give up our rights and freedom so easily just because of a lousy recession.”
Isn’t that what the dems said about the Iraq War?”
The government’s number one job is to defend the citizens militarily. Compromising our normal freedoms during wartime is often required. There is, however, no justification for elected officials to behave likewise while we endure rough financial times. This is what distinguishes our constitutional republic from a fascist dictatorship. The latter always seeks any excuse to deprive the citizenry of its liberties.
Apr 12, 2009 - 10:03 pm 19. bobdog:Suppose we just decided to have a bunch of incompetent, wrongheaded lawyers make all the little decisions in our lives for us, deciding what’s fair, what’s safe, what our rights are, what we are allowed to believe, how much of our income we get to keep…
But wait. They already do.
Apr 13, 2009 - 6:53 am 20. Rachel:“As the Wall Street Journal reported, the actual figure for all women’s median pay is 80.2% of men.”
Apr 13, 2009 - 7:52 am 21. I am McGehee, bitches.:77% or 80.2%, the point is that there is a gender wage gap that can not be explained away by differences in experience, education, or time out of the workforce. The market is not perfect but a result of thousands of decisions by individuals and their own biases. Gender wage discrimination exists and it is wrong. The Paycheck Fairness Act closes loopholes in the law and allows victims of discrimination their day in court. If your are a business owner who does not discriminate, you have nothing to fear. There will be no costly lawsuits to defend against if you pay your employees fairly and have a equitable wage setting system.
Pull the other one, it has bells on.
Merit has nothing to do with whether a lawsuit gets filed, any more than being right or wrong has anything to do with the outcome of said lawsuit.
Apr 13, 2009 - 8:38 am 22. trapper:These are just government mandated wage controls for whatever reason and will not work.
Apr 13, 2009 - 8:57 am 23. Charles Perry:Back in the Eighties, somebody at the Washington Times did a comparable study of various states’ comparable worth laws, and it became plain that the worth assigned to various jobs was 1) arbitrary; wildly different in different states and 2) strongly skewed to high pay for jobs which women tend to choose, such as teaching, nursing or librarianship, which were always “worth” as much as or more than trucking or steel puddling.
Apr 13, 2009 - 10:27 am 24. Rachel:We already have the most accurate comparable worth mechanism possible: the market.
The Paycheck Fairness Act is not about comparable worth. Comparable worth is certainly a strategy that is out there but lets not conflate that with the two pieces of legislation that are mentioned in this article. Neither the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act nor the Paycheck Fairness Act are about comparable worth or even mention the words.
According to a recent Cornell study, 90% of wage discrimination suits are decided in favor of the employer. The burden rests on the employee to prove discrimination. I am McGehee, bitches:Are you saying that those were not decided on merit but rather should have been decided in favor of the employee?
Apr 13, 2009 - 1:31 pm 25. LakeLevel:25 years ago, the lefty Minnesota state government decided it’s state workers should be paid by comparable worth. A study was done with all concievable factors considered and a ranking by computer was done.
Low and behold, jobs were being paid pretty much what this measure of comparable worth said they should. Well, that couldn’t be right, women need to be paid more and they wouldn’t let logic stand in the way. So, they took out the factors of the dangerousness of a job and unpleasant working conditions and then they got what they were looking for, raises for the female dominated office jobs. Not fair, not a real comparison of worth but then this was never about that. It’s just a political assualt on men by the Democrat party.
Apr 13, 2009 - 2:21 pm 26. Don:Before we worry about those sneaky schools of higher education and public hospitals evading the random walk of the market place while undervaluing the feminine mystique, how about we deal with the not so subtle first? If we can’t have equal pay for equal work without gaming the system with comparable worth, at least we can have equal dying for equal pay! Getting killed is up front, personal, and unambiguous, which is why war works—it’s so unsubtle. Women have been politically liberated with the vote since the twenties, the U.S. Army was racially integrated by executive order in the late forties and was successfully integrated by the mid fifties in the absence of affirmative action; it was called the draft. Yet in the midst of the modern “women’s movement” the kill ratio between male and female soldiers during the Vietnam War was ten thousand to one. Those dastardly free-fire zones were just to discriminatory, to the advantage of women. Today, the gender kill ratio between males and females is forty to one, so there has been some improvement, but Title Nine does not apply to the draft and National Security, and so there is no equal dying for equal pay in the military–Britney and Paris Hilton have skated again. Meanwhile the ratio of males to females graduating from American law schools is 1 to 1, and without comparable worth.
Apr 13, 2009 - 3:09 pm 27. PT:So if my female office clerks are lower paid, but deemed comparable to my male garbage truck drivers, why on eath would I, as the owner of the trucking company, not maximize my income by canning all my male drivers and replacing them with lower wage female office clerks?
Apr 14, 2009 - 5:26 pm 28. JackT:Actually, electing Ronald Reagan was a cockamamie idea. Prosperity never trickled down. The age of the homeless arrived during his terms, we shipped millions of jobs overseas, the Japanese bought up most of our real estate, Reagan created Sadam Hussein giving him tons of money and weapons, etc, etc. Please don’t get me started on Reagan.
Apr 14, 2009 - 9:01 pm 29. Bill:Jack T;
You’re a tool. The ‘homeless problem’ began in 1982 thanks to your beloved ACLU, which forced the disgorgement of thousands of mental patients from asyla onto the streets. Look it up.
And (although nobody but libs uses the term) wealth most assuredly did trickle down- the most prolonged peacetime boom, the longest period of prosperity, in American history.
But you want to boo-hoo about it because you didn’t get your free pony. WAAAAA! Get over it. No economic system will produce a utopia, but capitalism does better than any other scheme- certainly better than that discredited failure, socialism.
The notion that Reagan gave Saddam ‘tons of money and weapons’ is a lefty LIE. It’s a malicious fabrication by the no-blood-for-oil morons. Saddam’s weapons came from the Russians, the Chinese, and our ‘allies’ the French.
(BTW, the Japanese who bought up overpriced US real estate wound up taking a bath on it- he who laughs last and all that.)
Apr 15, 2009 - 12:22 pm 30. A.T.:The data from the CATO institute in “Women’s Figures” has been discredited. Way to use wrong information to front a ridiculous claim. You should just quit, Jennifer Rubin, because your investigation skills are obviously bass ackwards.
Apr 16, 2009 - 6:07 pm