Tweets WBUR’s Fred Thys.
I’m guessing Brown will say it wasn’t “bipartisan enough”. Which it could have been, of course, if he’d voted for it. He’s not working hard enough at this bipartisan thing, huh?
I’m having trouble imagining how it’s not a bipartisan priority to make sure women get paid the same as men for the same work. Unless, of course, one party doesn’t care much about women who vote. (And men who care about fairness.)
The paycheck bill would bar companies from retaliating against workers who inquire about pay disparities and permit employees to sue for punitive damages if they find evidence of broad differences in compensation between male and female workers. Democrats say the measure would bolster reforms enacted with the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter pay law that expanded the statute of limitations for filing equal-pay lawsuits.
This cat ain’t no moderate. A moderate would have figured out a way to vote for women’s paychecks.
Discuss
44 Comments . Leave a comment below.I don’t understand who he believes he is representing with an obstructionist vote like this.
BLS Median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers by occupation and gender, same exact job, different pay.
Brown seems to be okay with that.
What about comparative levels of education? Tenure? Relevant work experience? Average weekly hours? Adjustments for maternity leave? Etc., etc.
The BLS figures, while interesting, say little and prove nothing.
Impression of E.W. after convention: full of herself.
Definitely full enough to make this a campaign issue and lose even more of the white male vote. Who is supposed to pay for all this “fairness” besides male employees?
congratulations
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congratulations
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Wanting women to earn equal pay for equal work is a “war on men.”
Hmm. I must not have got the memo.
Sounds too much like nagging. We just reflexively pick up the remote control and turn up the volume when we hear women talk about “equal work.” But sure, equal pay, that’s fine.
How many more lies do we have to put up with before you get the boot? Editors, please take note…
And on Tuesdays, but that’s none of your business.
I don’t usually think of you as a troll, but who said anything about male employees being worse off? Are you seriously going to argue against fairness?
As for EW I suppose one has to be a little full of him or herself to run for major public office, but I certainly don’t see an inappropriate level of that from her.
Women are already doing better in the short term of this economy as well as the long term of the past generation. E.W. claims to be for the middle class, but she takes part in misguided attacks on men like this.
It speaks to her demonstrated ignorance of how an economy functions if she thinks that we can hobble the men who work hard, sacrifice, take risks and develop new ideas and somehow come out at the end with more money.
The results of this act would be to cut the productivity and earnings of all employees, male and female. Essentially it’s a strategy for a Mondale Democrat who seeks to divide and peel off this or that old liberal constituency. If at the end we are all worse off, that’s ok as long as I can tell my voters that they got theirs and we reduced inequality.
He is seriously going to argue against fairness. Apparently, men deserve more pay for equal work because only men work hard, sacrifice, take risks and develop new ideas.
I see that seascraper and dgc are local soldiers in the GOP war on women.
Seascraper makes an argument for people to get paid more even though they don’t deserve it.
Inefficiency should be baked into the system.
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The explicit sexism of this comment is offensive. Whatever happens with this participant, this comment should be removed.
Thanks for removing it, it was a rapid gut reaction I immediately regretted, late night commenting has many perils. The thing that irked me in Bob’s comment was that it’s not just men that sometimes get paid more than they deserve, oftentimes, women are often the beneficiaries of a sexist preference, in specific cases. For instance, I know this happens, a geeky male manager has a choice of hiring an attractive young woman fora web design job or another geeky older guy with lots more experience but about the same web design ability, the choice isn’t going to be that hard, even if the older guy is asking for less money. A woman adds tremendous value to the company from both a client and employee perspective, especially if she’s semi-attractive (but not too attractive). And that probably happens in lots of fields. I really find it hard to believe that managers ever prefer hiring a man, or especially paying him more. (And men also benefit from attractiveness, but without the hazards of being too attractive.)
My ‘Zero’ comment and Tom’s should also go, since now it looks like they are referring to Bob’s comment.
Oh, and this one, too.
thinker who votes against Republican party issues in a significant way, but the fact is that in every way that counts, he’s a fairly reliable vote for Republican positions when it’s needed. He may be able to show a list of votes he has taken in opposition of the party line, but his positions, which we never learn of until after the vote has been cast, is usually anti progressive.
I’ve always been a bit skeptical of the women make 70 cents on a man’s dollar argument, because while I don’t doubt it’s true it misses the disparity in who does what work. Here, however, we are talking about the Lily Ledbetters of the world who find out they are making less than their male counterparts for doing the same job. As for women doing better in the short term, you’ll need to back that up. In fact Mitt Romney, who I assume you support, claims women are doing worse and uses that to blame the failures of the “Obama economy” for creating a war on women of a different sort.
if you talk about comparable work by comparable employees — factor out the unfair but difficult to quantify issue of “women’s jobs” being paid less than “men’s jobs” as well as women who aren’t in the workforce full time as long — women are earning around 90% of what men earn for doing the same work with the same qualifications. I have no doubt that some companies are fair, which means other companies are discriminating more than a 10% discrepancy.
We can argue about the issues of whether jobs in general are paid less when they’re filled predominantly by females, but as you noted, what this was talking about is the Lily Ledbetters of the world who are in fact paid less for doing the same exact jobs as their male counterparts. It is astonishing to me that anyone could object to making sure people get paid fairly for doing the same exact jobs. I guess the problem they claimed to have with this was the government enforcement, since in the world of today’s GOP, corporations can always be trusted to do the right thing without regulations of any kind. Although to be fair, they think that about people too, when it comes to things like gun ownership. But not about things like what a woman can do with her own body or who should be allowed to marry whom.
… the Washington post highlights how the numbers compare when you control for life choices.
But in a way there is a cart before horse issue, as Yglesias points out. The assumption when ‘adjusting’ the numbers for ‘life choices’ is that those choices happen ‘independently’. That is, when a woman makes a choice to raise stay home with kids, it’s a choice that isn’t independent of the wage gap – it is often a choice because of the wage gap,
I got a feeling we will be hearing a lot of that from Brown.
It sounded to me like the bill would essentially cause all covered employers to make each employee’s pay public, or at least known to all other employees.
Second, it shifts the burden of proof from the one claiming discrimination to the employer, which is left with a short list of affirmative defenses, all of which would depend on the employer’s HR department keeping super-duper perfect records.
I guess it would improve employment by increasing the number of HR professionals needed, as well as for law firms that do discrimination litigation. If an employer client asked, I would recommend that they not support the bill, which is effectively a “here, do a lot of silly paperwork, or else you’ll be sued” bill. Those usually don’t work. (See, Sarbanes-Oxley).
Not that I would expect the Senator to spell those objections out.
I am sympathetic to your reservations. We have heard reservations like these for generations (at least since the mid-70s), and the compensation gap remains between men and women doing the same work. I’d like to note that if employers actually paid men and women the same compensation for doing the same work, the problems you raise would tend to solve themselves.
If the approach of this bill is flawed, please suggest a different alternative. Simply saying “NO” only perpetuates a problem that demands a solution.
I don’t have a lot of confidence in those surveys because it seems like it is extraordinarily difficult to measure what “equal work” is for most skilled jobs, and especially white collar or professional jobs. Does it account for use of maternity/paternity leave? Expectations that weekends are off limits to work demands, or available for work demands? Expectations of being home for dinner, or being in the office for 15-hour days regularly?
By shifting the burden of all of this onto the employer, it forces the employer to categorize everyone in order to maintain groups doing “equal work.” “Oh, you are a computer systems specialist Level 6, and are paid as are all of the other Level 6s.” This bears far too much of a resemblance to the industry-wrecking aspects of Wagner Act unionism for my taste because it forces artificial conformity onto arbitrary and artificial job categories, all of which were established for legal and regulatory purposes only.
In other words, (i) I am at least initially skeptical of newspaper headlines about the wage gap; and (ii) assuming there is a problem, I do not necessarily think that it must be solved, by legislation, at any cost. And I most certainly view the proposal as an extremely costly one from an economic perspective.
Mr. lynn, you are right, it doesn’t mandate disclosure, but prohibits prohibitions. That mitigates my concern a bit on that issue, because (one hopes) few people are so thoroughly crass as to ask someone about pay directly, and that the ones who are may be told, often, to go f%^&k themselves.
I suppose we have different reactions to the wage gap surveys.
The professional women I know (and there are many) all say that, if anything, the wage gap surveys understate the differences. While rationalizations for these differences vary wildly, I think you’re mistaken if you think that the gap doesn’t exist.
I have no problem with your skepticism, in the same sense that some healthy skepticism is similarly appropriate in measuring the immediacy and gravity of the global warming problem. While none of the measurement approaches we know of are perfect, all of them agree that a wage gap exists. When I combine that with the anecdotal experience of the professional women in my own life, I conclude that the gap is real and significant.
This leaves me wanting to re-ask the question I started with. If legislation is not the solution, then what is?
Ok, you’re a pessimist about analysis. Personally I believe in the power of analysis. I also believe in the power of bad analysis, but that’s different than asserting the task is impossible.
Moreover, you’re a pessimist with regard to what it would take to achieve conformity with the law. I suspect it won’t be anywhere near that as everyone has a huge incentive to pursue the path of least resistance. \
Your pessimism is further telegraphed by the phrase “I do not necessarily think that it must be solved, by legislation, at any cost.” There is probably a price to the legislation but drawing a comparison to ‘any cost’ is hyperbolic.
Personally, I’m not skeptical of a wage gap at all. There’s enough data to show there is definitely a gap and to further show that it isn’t 100% explainable alone by non-gender issues and non-discriminatory factors that happen to be gender-correlated.
Shifting the burden onto the employer from where? Setting wages is something employers do now. Or are you talking about the categorizing? If you think that isn’t something employers commonly do now, you’ve never worked at a company that implemented a “matrix” system for setting salaries. I assure you that it isn’t some union device; companies do it to appear to quantify the value of labor. I say “appear to,” because it’s most often a way to not give people raises that they would otherwise expect. Typically, when the matrix is implemented, senior employees find themselves at the top of their level, such that to get a raise they must do something extraordinary to get more money. The sham becomes obvious when they do the extraordinary things and are still denied a raise. Anyway, my point is that categorizing is not a problem for management when they can use it to their advantage.
I’m trying to find information that would confirm what it ‘sounded like to you’.
Thus far what I’ve found is that the act doesn’t “cause all covered employers to make each employee’s pay public”. It restricts employers from preventing people making their own pay public. Mind you his makes pretty reasonable sense for fairness regardless of gender.
With regard to HR professionals needed, I’m not so sure its actually that big a deal. From wikipedia:
So to be clear – if there isn’t a wage disparity there really isn’t any extra work for HR. If there is, you just need to keep a record as to why it’s justified. This is probably not a big deal either as it’s just another piece of paper for the file. If it really takes that much ‘work’ to do ‘justification’, maybe it isn’t actually that justified. If it is pretty justifiable, it’d be pretty easy to file.
I could have read every Republican Senator’s press release for that, no real substance behind the rhetoric though.
think of excessive paperwork. Seems the employer isn’t shy about generating paper when its in his interests.
My job discouraged people from discussing our pay with each other, because some of us were paid way more than others. I could be working side by side or even supervising and teaching someone with less experience, who bluffed his or her way into getting a much higher salary, or said they had higher “salary requirements.” Will this law mean they can’t ask people what their “salary requirements” are? I never understood how to answer that, I just want to know what the job pays and what they will want me to do, and I’ll tell them if I can do that and if I want the job.
And, will it mean that if I ask for a raise to make the same as Holly makes, they have to give it to me?
that my pay is 1) a matter of public record 2) on a clear schedule that makes it clear my pay isn’t a result of golfing with my boss.
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Ir is the law about equal work for equal pay, regardless of gender?
Yes, johnt001, I thought I remembered that too, but was going to dig through the comments to prove it. I also vaguely recall DGC claiming to be a Socialist, but again proving it would require more effort than I’m willing to expend.
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…was NOT going to dig through the comments to prove it!
I have better things to do with my time than go through DGC’s comments looking for discrepancies – I don’t think I have enough hard drive space to store everything I’d find…
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