Obama Kicks Off “Women’s Rally For Change”
Barack Obama held a “Women’s Rally for the Change We Need” at the University of Miami today, and released an ad featuring Lilly Ledbetter, the Alabama woman whose battles led to the 2007 fair pay legislation that carries her name.
Ledbetter says in the ad, “I’d been paid 40% less than men doing the same work. John McCain opposed a law to give women equal pay for equal work.”
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obama/biden the only logical choice
Obama is reaching out to the sheep of our country. The failures who think “government” is the only answer to their personal foibles.
Good luck, America.
Wow Tim Hays – being a woman is a failure and a personal foible?
I’m sure your mother and wife would not agree
Mahopac Mom obviously needs help with reading comprehension (and capitalization).
Mahopac Mom,
First off, we can take care of ourselves-we don’t need the government telling us how much to pay one another.
Secondly, unfortunately, people read “equal pay for equal work” as “same pay for the same work” (Apples compared to apples). Which is what Ledbetter is suggesting in this ad.
However, that is not what “equal pay for equal work” is. Rather, the people who want “equal pay for equal work” want to compare the value of what an (for example) adminstrative assistant adds to a company compared to what the landscapers, or project managers, or lawyers, and/or the IT people add to the company, and based on their value to the company, pay all of them the same wage instead of their worth.
Ultimately it is the free market system that works. Equal pay for equal work is like comparing apples to oranges.
I know I am not explaining this clearly but I hope that the consultant or Mr. Hays will straighten out my jibberish.
equal pay for equal work means if you are a senior
account exec at a major ad agency and a guy making 100,000
with 10 years experience and a masters degree..a woman
in the same job with the same experience should get
the same salary.. However if you are a shoe shiner
and female and I am a male senior master electrician
clearly no matter how long and hard you work you would
not be entitled to the same pay as me…because the work
we do is not equal therefore the pay we get should not be
How’s that?
“the consultant
September 23rd, 2008 at 2:42 pm
equal pay for equal work means if you are a senior account exec at a major ad agency and a guy making 100,000 with 10 years experience and a masters degree..a woman in the same job with the same experience should get the same salary.. However if you are a shoe shiner and female and I am a male senior master electrician clearly no matter how long and hard you work you would not be entitled to the same pay as me…because the work we do is not equal therefore the pay we get should not be
How’s that?”
Sorry it took so long to respond. My concerns we based on the wording of earlier bills I have included the Heritage Foundation’s take on such bills:
9/29/86 26
Heritage Foundation
EQUAL PAY FOR UNEQUAL WORK: THE’ FALLACIES OF “COMPARABLE WORTH”
(Updating Heritage Lecture No. 63, “Comparable Worth: Pay Equity or Social Engineering?” February 5, 1986.)
Proponents of “comparable worth’17plan to attach a bill (S. 519) to the Continuing Resolution. If enacted by Congress, “The Federal Employee Anti-Sex-Discrimination in compensation Act” would:
o establish a nine-member Commission on Compensation Equity to select a consultant to study whether federal wage-setting practices are in compliance with laws prohibiting sex discrimb)4tion;
o require the consultant to assign valuation points to different jobs as a means of ranking them and to compare the rankings to determine whether there is wage discrimination between males and females doing work of comparable skill, effort, and responsibility under similar working conditions; and
o require the Director of the Office of Personnel Management to prepare a plan and timetable for implementing the consultant’s recommendations.
It is economically senseless, and illegal as well, to deny equal pay for equal work and equal opportunity for women in hiring and promotions. It is just as senseless, however, to mandate equal pay for unequal work. And this is what S. 519 effectively will do. The bill’s enactment would-be viewed as congressional endorsement of the doctrine of comparable worth. This would send a new and confusing message to the courts regarding the intent.of Congress in the case of existing antidiscrimination laws, such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and Title VII of-the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The legislative history of the’Equal Pay Act, for instance, reveals that Congress has explicitly rejected comparable worth as an aspect of pay equity.
Most federal judges, together with the Department of Justice, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, have rejected comparable worth evaluations as a valid way to identify sex-based wage discrimination. And the General
Accounting Office has expressed serious reservations about even conducting a federal comparable worth study, noting that comparing the value of different jobs is inherently a subjective exercise. Moreover, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 sensibly requires a demonstration of intentional discrimination—that is, an employer must be shown to be setting the wages in a female-dominated job below the market rate because of gender. The total disregard in the comparable worth legislation for this “intent” requirement renders it extremely confusing as a legal doctrine. Basing a decision concerning wage discrimination among dissimilar jobs on a ‘consultant’s opinion, rather than the marketplace, is to ignore the law of supply and demand as well as any semblance of objectivity. The consultant is to determine a job’s worth by assigning weighted values based on skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions, then totaling the points for each job. Jobs with the same total, even if very different in nature, would be defined as of comparable worth to be paid at the same rate. Yet this supposedly objective system of job evaluation is in fact subjective because a person, the consultant, would make personal decisions as to the relative significance of each factor. And with a different consultant, discrimination would disappear in one set of jobs and appear in another. This has happened when states have sought to establish a scale of job evaluations. In the Fall 1986 Policy Revie , Richard Burr, an analyst with the Center for.-the Study of American Business, notes that a secretary would be ranked first among three jobs in Washington State and Iowa, but last in Minnesota and Vermont. Clearly, comparable worth is a concept riddled with flaws and contradictions.
If wages in America were to be evaluated and ordered by a new layer of bureaucracy, the result would be artificial wage differentials, leading to shortages of workers in some occupations, surpluses in others, and a boost in total unemployment. In the real world, the wage differential between jobs reflects the value that employers place on the contributions of different groups of workers to the final product, together with the scarcity of qualified workers relative’to the demand for their contributions. only supply and demand can determine value.
The tools best suited to prevent sex-based wage discrimination are those that have been used effectively over the past’twenty years, chiefly Title VII, which guarantees women an equal opportunity to compete for jobs traditionally dominated by men, and the Equal Pay Act, which enforices the principle of equal pay for equal work. These laws.improve the operation of the labor market by promoting the free flow of workers to the jobs where they can be most productive. Comparable worth would abandon this sound approach, substituting the judgments of an army of highly subjective bureaucrats for those determined objectively by the free market.
John E. Buttarazzi Research Assistant
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right now there is a bigger problem…as republicans have
rejected the rescue plan by a 2-1 margin in the house
voting agiains their own president,,their own nominee
their minority leader and whip..