I heard over and over again today at the convention that “women earn 79 Cents on the dollar compared to men” and it’s even worse for black women and worse yet for Latino women when all the aforementioned are being paid to do the same job. So my curious question is this: If I am a free market capitalist and I can hire a Latino women to do the same job as my white male neighbor, why is he not out of a job and she not occupying the office down the hall?
For that matter, why is it not that white males have horrifically high unemployment rates in a nation where their labor cost to do the same job is significantly higher than anyone else?
This is what I don’t like about the “equal pay” debate. It does not add up. It requires the belief that a ruthless free market capitalist places “tribal loyalty” above profit. While I am sure that is the case in a few scenarios, I think we’d be better off explaining this pay gap in other ways.
Simply put, wages for labor that is typically more attractive to women and/or the only labor available to many minorities has been devalued by society, a society controlled for the most part by……….white males.
And the question becomes, what role can/should government play in the remedy?
Could you please do it for me?
Thank you!
When legislators take the stage and call out these numbers, ask them “What are you doing about it?”
spend some time looking at how the labor market works and reading so that you can intelligently answer your own question rather than asking others to write a post for you?
Add to it, there’s a somewhat irresponsible hint of racism that I don’t like here.
It “works” according to a set of rules written by those in power to write the rules. If you want to know who those people are, follow the money, and please hold back on the personal attacks. They bore me.
…(at least in part). There’s still the prejudicial assumption that whites and men are better qualified.
…and the prejudicial assumption that any work typically done by a woman is not worthy. That’s part of the reason why so few people cook at home, at least that’s the opinion of Michael Pollan and I agree with him.
Anyone who believes we live in a capitalist society is falling for a rather extensive con. The US “capitalist” economy behaves that way about as much as Russia, a “Christian” nation behaves that way. Three points:
-As Cass Sunstein has very well proven, among many others, the actors within our system are not rational. As christopher and john point out, consumers and producers are not making rational decisions. It would be a waste of time to list the many examples.
– A good part, possibly a lion’s share of the economic activity in our country do not fit the capitalist model. They are labeled “externalities”, given a few paragraphs in an Econ 101 textbook, and ignored. The entire activity around pollution is centered on an externality that was blithely ignored by mainstream economics until it almost destroyed our environment.
– With the sheer amount of subsidies, sometimes in the form of tax breaks, pumped into our economy by our government, there’s no way to call it capitalist. Our energy and financial sectors would look very different if energy producers couldn’t rely on government handouts.
I’ve been subject to economics courses four times in my academic career, and it feels closer to theology to science every time I take it.
I went by the stats on the AAUW (American Association University Women) website which uses the 79 cents on the dollar women / men ratio. Farther down the page on their website I noticed that Asian-American women make 90 cents to the dollar (compared to white men). Latino women were much lower than the 79%.
Are there lessons that can be learned from the Asian community, are people more racist against Latinos, is there more of a language barrier in occupations chosen by Hispanics? They put the info up there by race, (I don’t need to hear the “Trumpets” sound saying I’m racist), I’m just curious to hear any explanations from people here.
I’m curious as to what jobs those Asian women do. My guess is that they are jobs that have more men doing them. Again, I think that the wage discrepancy foundation is in society’s acceptance that the work that appeals to women is simply not as valuable as the work that appeals to men. Even women are guilty of this.
The issue is same work, different pay.
I’ve worked for over 40 years and never seen a case where a female co-worker made less or more than me. I’m not saying it does not happen. I’ve just never seen it. Further, I can’t understand why any business owner would hire more expensive labor than what was available at a lower rate. it just does not fit into my understating of capitalism.
candidates. There is no scale or rate, they is always a general range but there are significant often disparities in pay. There are a lot of factors obviously but if you take a sample as group have you would see a trend.
Just because you specifically didn’t witness something doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
I had a co-worker at one time who’s argument against polls was that no one asked him. That’s real.
Stats can be difficult though. If “retail sales” are all included together then you have clothing sales (dominated by women) in with car sales (dominated by men), there is a difference based on the job. The fact that there are fewer women in car sales is a different problem (same with minorities) but to say the basis of pay difference is gender is misleading.
Male nurses make more than females. Digging into the stats though shows more male nurses (percentage wise) have finished their masters to go into higher paying jobs within the “nursing” field.
I only have a factory career as a reference and where I worked a job went up on the “bid board” and you put in your slip and senior person got the job (unless there were physical/educational limitations).
I’m not excusing different pay for equal work, that would be wrong. Let’s just make sure the stats are not masking what could be a different explanation.
… alledged rapists aside, the fear Trump is peddling is economic: they are coming over the border for your jobs. ‘They’ being Latinos, male and female.
But even if we discount the (actually statistically negligible) illegal immigrant population, who is it that you think is working at Amazon ‘fullfilment’ centers? And much of the Massachusetts remaining textile factories? Or any factory in the US? Take public transportation to and from any factory you can think of an it will be filled with hard workers, manu of whom will be speakers of either Spanish or Portuguese, probably majority female.