The bills, duplicating the language of previous failed efforts, would
define a prohibited employment practice for employers of four or more where pay
differs on the basis of gender, and sets up a procedure receive damages if a
violation is present. This year versions applying to the private sector are known
as HB
453 by state Rep. Barbara Norton and
SB
153 by state Sen. Edwin Murray
clones Norton’s. SB
68 by state Sen. Karen Peterson
does the same for state and local government employment. The important
operative phrase in all three is this:
In other words, this introduces the “comparable worth” concept into state law as a way of combating assumed pay differentials between men and women. These days, the oft-quoted, but meaningless, figure is women in Louisiana get paid 69 cents on every dollar men earn – meaningless because it looks simply the aggregation of incomes from all jobs, ignoring such considerations as
- Men disproportionately gravitate to the higher-paying and often more hazardous jobs
- Women disproportionately gravitate to positions more of a part-time nature or those that feature shorter hours
- Educational attainment typically seems to be higher among men than women in total across the workforce
- Even full-time women workers work less than their male counterparts, because in aggregate they are more likely to take time off from work for reproductive issues
- Women also are more likely to be less reliable workers because they typically are the ones with child-rearing responsibilities, interfering with work
- Seniority in tenure disproportionately increases pay levels, and men are estimated to stay in the same job almost twice as long as women because women are much more likely to change jobs to accommodate their spouses than the opposite
In fact, for decades now, when taking these considerations into account,
the percentage of male wages earned by women in the same job consistently
hovers around a statistically insignificant 98 percent. And in some categories,
such as among single, childless, urban workers in their twenties, using the all
jobs, all workers standard that ignores these variables, women earned an
average of eight percent more than their male counterparts – probably because more
women are going to college now than men.
Those differences come from different productivity, and that’s why the
comparable worth standard in these bills is particularly insidious. It tries to
create a standard where pay is on the basis of presumed qualifications and
skills required, not on the actual output by each individual employee as valued
in the marketplace. And this would reach across job categories, not just within
jobs. It would mandate, for example, that registered nurses (most being women)
had to be paid more than computer programmers (mostly male) because they would
need bachelors’ degrees in the former instance as opposed to associates’
degrees in the latter, regardless of market demands. The wording of the bills,
while not explicitly demanding this, is such that they could be interpreted this
way; the authors aren’t saying whether they hope an activist judiciary could
take laws like these on such a ride.
The concept behind the bills simply puts ideological prejudice ahead of
the freedom of employers to pay according to the actual contribution made by an
employee, as shaped by market forces. The free market, not government fiat,
should determine why people earn what they do (a basic law of human behavior
already ignored
by minimum wage laws) as the multitude of voluntary transactions controlled
by no one group does the best job of appropriate pricing.
1 comment:
"HB 68 by Sen. Karen Peterson..." is an obvious, glaring error.
Who, if anyone, proofs or edits your posts?
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