The idea of the American dream is that if you work hard and do your part, you can get ahead. Even if you are born poor or immigrate to this country with nothing but the clothes on your back, if you work hard, you and your children should be able to succeed.
But these days, too many people who work hard and do their part struggle to make ends meet. The Massachusetts economy is booming, but the cost of living is high and many have been left behind. In one of the wealthiest states in the richest country in the history of the world, no one who works full time should struggle to afford basic necessities.
Rising inequality is one of the greatest public policy challenges of our time. As Senior Advisor for Jobs & Competitiveness in President Obama’s White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, I worked with tremendously talented colleagues throughout the government to advance policies that would help build an economy that works for everyone, not just the very rich.
In the era of Trump, much of the progress we made over the past eight years is now vulnerable.
But there are some concrete things we can do here in Massachusetts to help working people get ahead and build an economy that works for all.
Here are six ideas we should start with:
First, it’s time to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Too many people who work full time struggle to make ends meet. It’s time to raise the minimum wage so that people who work hard can make a living wage and provide for themselves and their families.
Second, it’s time for paid family leave. Workers should not be forced to choose between work and their own health needs or the well-being of their children and other family members.
Third, we need to pass the Millionaire’s Tax to raise the revenue we need to invest in world-class public schools, affordable public higher education, and a transportation system that allows people to get to school or work.
Fourth, we need ensure that everyone has access to affordable, high quality health care. We need to fight against Republican efforts to push tens of millions off of health insurance, and move towards truly universal health care, ideally through a single payer/Medicare-for-all system.
Fifth, we need to ensure equal pay for equal work. It is shameful that even right out of college women make less than men, even accounting for education and type of work. Recent legislation requiring equal pay for comparable work is a big step forward, but we need to ensure that its promise translates into actual results.
Sixth, we need to invest in our thriving innovation economy. Massachusetts has some of the best universities and health care institutions in the world. We are at the cutting edge of science and engineering research, and we have some of most innovative technology and biotech companies in the world. We need to continue to invest in the institutions and people that make Massachusetts dynamic and unique, and must also ensure that these investments are centered on the idea that everyone, no matter where they come from or what they earn, stands to benefit from continued economic growth.
Together, we can make sure that the economy of Massachusetts works for all, and remains prosperous for a long time to come.
Quentin Palfrey is a progressive Democrat running for Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor. You can learn more about his campaign and get involved at www.quentinpalfrey.com, by visiting his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/qpalfrey, or by following him on Twitter at @qpalfrey
On #5, how is “comparable” work decided on? On a related note, more men get injured or killed on the job and have shorter lives. Are the supporters of “equal pay” willing to subject women to more dangerous jobs that will result in shorter lives and increased injury in order to better equalize wages?
….and assuming that men make “X” while women make “X-1”, where does the “1” come from? If it comes from male workers, this is a “revenue neutral” result for the working class. If it comes from the employers, the 1%, it would be a real benefit, but one that I see as rather difficult to achieve given the current interrelationship between the Democratic Party and the aforementioned group.
Ah, another example of JTM’s ringing support for working class women.
This supporter or equal pay notes that police work is a very dangerous job, and yes, I’m willing to “subject” members of my gender to such work — in fact, I support the efforts of women and minorities to challenge the discrimination that keeps them out of those jobs. See “Overwhelmingly white male Mass. State Police force no accident, claims discrimination lawsuit”.
Okay, more state police as women. That’s a good position to take, one that I can endorse 100%…..there’s still a lot of ground between that and the entire talking point of “equal pay”.
Democrats have this horrible habit of repeating “80 cents on the dollar” or so on ” but that’s just per capita comparisons with no controlling for job type, experience, etc. It’s purely “What does the average female make per hour?” v. “What does the average male make per hour?” Once you actually compare professions, the gap closes fast to single digits; depending on how you control, it is between about 3-8%.
So while the “pay gap” is technically a thing which is real, it fails to take into account that women live longer, spend more time with friends and family, have better life/work balance and are far less likely to get injured or worse on the job.
And again, Democrats have yet to explain where the money comes to fill in this gap. Do we fill it by seeing that men make less? If that’s the case, my wife and I are no better off at the end of the year. If we make up the amount from the employers, how do we do that? If a person is running a business with a labor cost of X% to cover her 34 male and 34 female employees and has to increase the wages of the female employees by “Y”, is the employer willing to decrease their net profit by “Y?
“Once you actually compare professions, the gap closes fast to single digits; depending on how you control, it is between about 3-8%.”
I invite you to provide a link supporting this assertion. It took me about a minute to find, for example, this 2017 study that does just that (compare professions).
The gap is MUCH closer to the 20-30% than your claimed “3-8%”.
Regarding where the money comes from? It comes from somewhere (your favorite attack phrase to me). “Somewhere”, including:
1. Lower wage growth for men
2. Higher payroll costs for employers, resulting in higher prices or lower profits.
3. Growth in the economy — increased spending power for women means that women spend more money, increasing sales volume for the businesses they patronize.
Wages are not a zero-sum gain — a rising tide lifts all the boats.
It doesn’t sound like you’ve looked very hard. The web is chock full of recent research like this that support the 20-30% claim.
I invite you to provide a link supporting your “3-8%” claim.
Regarding where the money comes from — wages are not a zero-sum game. Increased spending power of women directly translates to increased growth of the economy.
A rising tide lifts all the boats.
Software developers, construction project managers, computer systems admin, registered nurses, elementary school teachers, in other words, in occupations where there are large numbers of male and female workers, the differences are 1-4%, probably because men take less time off to spend with family.
Thank you for the link. That’s a fascinating choice. I note, from the About->Board of Directors page, that “PayScale Human Capital” is controlled by Warburg Pincus:
Funny how all those concerns about “Wall street sell outs” fade away when the source confirms your biases. Another tip from a top-notch organizational development consultant I know — any time somebody uses a phrase like “Human Capital” to describe men and women, you’d better watch your wallet.
The methodology of that link is fascinating. Rather than report actual data from actual women, instead we this:
What I see is a page filled with unchallenged gender stereotypes and reporting what appears to be a self-fulfilling prophesy driven by a magic (“proprietary”) algorithm.
JTM’s link says the delta for software developers is 4%. The actual DATA, reported by the link I cited, provides a very different number for the same field:
Women’s median weekly earnings: $1,553
Women’s earnings as a percent of men’s: 83.4%
Men’s median weekly earnings: $1,863.
No “proprietary” algorithms. Hard data.
I know a little bit about the software development industry. I suggest that the claim that the gender wage gap in the software development industry is 4% has approximately as much credibility as the claim by Microsoft that it is committed to the highest standards of software quality.
I do appreciate the link. It does help illuminate your perspective on the very real 20% gender wage gap.
The OpenSecrets.org page for Warburg Pincus might further illuminate the biases of the source cited by JTM.
The firm donated primarily to Democratic candidates prior to the 2o12 campaign season. Since then, it has reduced its support for Democrats and SIGNIFICANTLY increase its support for Republican candidates.
So far, in the 2018 cycle, 74% of its contributions have been to Republicans. In the 2016 campaign, the split was 35% Democrats, 56% Republicans.
This does not strike me as a neutral source.
There is no such thing as a neutral source. We learned that in a journalism class I took in high school. Still, there are facts.
But no matter.
The argument that women earn less than men is often presented in terms that pit men against women, see women as victim, men as oppressor – the sort of thing the professional class Democrats love to do to the working class, eh? Pit one side against the other.
But I digress.
Yes, men, overall, make higher wages that women but the lion’s share of this lies in the reality that men take on more dangerous jobs, work more hours, see less of friends and family, are more likely to work while sick or injured and feel more pressure from society to be the breadwinners in a family.
Women, on the other hand, take safer jobs, work fewer hours, spend more time with friends and family, place their personal health above work, and have less pressure to be the breadwinner.
Personally, I think that a sane approach to this entire subject would be to look at the working class as a whole and work towards women earning more and men reaching a better work/life balance. And we can only do so if we stop pitting men against women and see the 1% as the real reason for the problems facing the working class citizens of the USA.
This comment is a fine example of mansplaining.
JTM is the only participant in this thread NOT looking at the “the working class as a whole”. It is JTM who objects to these provisions. It is JTM who repeats spurious and flagrantly sexist assumptions (“men take on more dangerous jobs, work more hours, …”!).
Equal pay provisions do NOT pit men against women. Sexist stereotypes (“Women, on the other hand, take safer jobs, work fewer hours, spend more time with friends and family, place their personal health above work, and have less pressure to be the breadwinner.”) DO pit men against women.
These objections are classic canonical examples of sexist stereotypes and are, in fact, flagrantly sexist attacks on women.
A classic example of the elite professional class exerting it superiority over ordinary working class, dismissing their struggle and ignoring their plight….and making sure to pit working class against working class…as the professional class remains loyal non-economic liberal causes but still tethered to the 1% because, as they themselves admit the money has to come from somewhere.
Lots of bluster about some “elite professional class”. Nothing about the very concrete example of software developers that JTM himself started with. Apparently when JTM wants to cherry-pick gender wage gap data, software developers are working class men and women. When faced with actual facts and when his sexist assumptions are called out, suddenly software developers are an “elite professional class”.
JTM says there is only a 3-5% gender wage gap among software developers. He says that the women I work with every day “work fewer hours, spend more time with friends and family, place their personal health above work, and have less pressure to be the breadwinner”.
Bullshit. The women who work alongside me are at their machines as long as I am. My male colleagues spend just as much time with their friends. There is NO difference that I’m able to see — except that my female colleagues are often paid a third less.
The offensive lines about women workers repeated by JTM are explicitly called out as sexist in the mandatory training material delivered to every employee by my fortune-100 employer.
They ARE sexist.
So women earn less then men because men are evil. Got it. Thanks for chiming in.
Once more, the characterization is yours. I didn’t use the word “evil”, that’s your contribution.
Women earn less than men in large part because men have dominated our society until very recently.
Women earn less then men because men like you decide that there’s no problem. Men like you decide that women “work fewer hours, spend more time with friends and family, place their personal health above work, and have less pressure to be the breadwinner”.
I didn’t say “evil”. Such attitudes are, however, at the root of why the gender-based wage gap exists.
And it most certainly DOES exist — no matter what a “proprietary” algorithm from a hedge-fund controlled “human capital” company says.
So why do more men die on the job?
I mean, if men are the evil and dominated all these years, you’d think that more women would die on the job, just saying, That’s a piss poor job of dominating when you lose your life doing so…
“Evil” is your word, remember?
There are people who disagree with the statement “white people have advantages”. About half of the people who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary and Donald Trump in the general disagreed with that statement.
For most of us, that is prima facie evidence of racism.
This discussion about gender-based wage discrimination is exactly parallel. There are people who disagree with the statement “men make more than women”. You are apparently one of them.
For most of us, that is prima facie evidence of sexism.
This diary, and your comments here, are helpful because they make it clear what you actually mean when you claim to support working class women.
By all means, continue your commentary. The more you write, the more clear your true attitudes becomes.
Yup, anyone who voted for Bernie or Trump is a racist, and they all hated women.
Thanks for chiming in with your informative remarks. I
Why? Why do you lie about my comments like this? This is truly bizarre.
Which part of “about half of …” is hard to understand? Do you live in a world where “about half of” means “all”? Where did I write that any group “all hated women”? Do you understand that paying women less money for the same job is different from “hate”? Do you understand that “about half of” is different from “all”?
Is it so hard to write something like “I didn’t think about these things from woman’s perspective before. I can see that I’ve been mistaken”?
Your responses like this are why I characterize so much of you commentary here as “trolling”. I try reasonably hard to say so when I agree with you. I uprate your comments and diaries when I agree with them. How else, other than trolling, am I to interpret responses like this from you?
As I said an hour or so ago, the more you write the more you reveal about yourself. What truly mystifies me is:
1. Why do you so flagrantly misquote, distort, and turn upside down text that all of us can read. What do you hope to gain by this?
2. Why do you tell us that you support women and support equal pay for women when you so passionately argue against exactly that in exchanges like this?
Taken together, your comments here say:
– There is no actual gender-based wage gap (at most 3-5%)
– People who say to the contrary are members of some “elite professional class” striving to hurt you
– Even if there is a gap, that’s ok because women work fewer hours, take more time off, spend more time with their families, etc, etc., etc.
– Anybody who dares to disagree with you is a “wall-street sellout”.
I hate to break this to you, but this commentary is flagrantly insulting to women, brazenly sexist, and epitomizes the worst stereotypes of hostile patriarchal men attempting to bully the women around them.
Your commentary here is NOT that of someone who supports women or who supports equal pay for women.
You might want to consider that nursing is one of the most dangerous occupations in the country (by some measures the third most dangerous) when you use gender as shorthand for risk-assessment.
And, yes, I am cognizant of male nurses; I’m talking stereotypes here.
There was a hostage taking incident at a hospital in Geneva, IL in the same unit where my wife had a clinical the month before. Both nurses were sexually assaulted by the inmate who had been taken in to receive treatment. It sent a shiver down the spine of her entire graduating class.
And we don’t need to talk stereotypes. There are women police officers, firefighters, and generals in the military. Yes, “traditionally female” jobs can also be very dangerous. I think waitressing is one of the jobs generating the top OSHA complaints,
But we should also acknowledge we are increasingly living in a world without gender distinctions and we should embrace this rather than fear it.
While nursing is a dangerous occupation, ranking #1 in back injuries, by the way, the data is clear : 92% of work-related deaths in 2012 were to men.
“Equal pay for equal work”
That means women working the same jobs are getting paid less for doing the same jobs.
Since 1979, median household income in Massachusetts has barely budged, growing only half a percentage point each year after adjusting for inflation. By contrast, among the highest-income one percent of households, income has risen by 4.3 percent annually.
In Massachusetts, where the highest-income one percent of households have seen more rapid income growth than in any other state: 341 percent between 1979 and 2014 (the most recent year for which data is available). Ten percent of all Massachusetts income went to the highest-income one percent of households in 1979. In 2014 it was 25 percent.
I don’t see much in #1, #2, #3, #4, or #5 to address these two points.
You’re absolutely correct.
This proposal does absolutely nothing to address wealth concentration, and nearly nothing to address income concentration.
Even with all these in place, the rich will continue to get richer and the rest of us will continue to get poorer.
All six points are great things that we ought to do. It is deceptive to bundle this together and describe it as a plan to “Build an economy that works for everyone”.
With all these points in place (no small order!), the economy will continue to work MUCH better for the 0.1% than for the rest of us.
Steering this thread back to the original poster-how will you use all the awesome powers of the Lieutenant Governor’s office to advance this agenda? What experiences do you have driving legislation and policy changes that you will employ in this position?
These are 6 fine ideas that our Democratic supermajority has been woefully unable to tackle. Even if we have a Democratic governor, he (wish we could say she) will be unable to tackle these problems without legislative cooperation that doesn’t seem to be forthcoming. How do you intend to move the ball forward on these issues despite these limitations?
Thanks for your question, jconway. In terms of my background, I have spent most of my career in government and as a lawyer. I’m still building out my website (www.quentinpalfrey.com) but some information about my background is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin_Palfrey At the federal level, I worked in the Obama White House and in the Commerce Department, and I had the opportunity to work on a bunch of pieces of legislation, including the America Invents Act, which was passed in 2011 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/09/16/america-invents-act-turning-ideas-jobs On the state level, I worked as the chief of the health care division in the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office in the period right after health reform was passed here. I didn’t work on the actual legislation, but we were one of the leading pro-consumer voices in working through a number of the most important implementation questions.
On the question of how to use the LG office effectively to promote an economy that works for everyone, I’d love to hear your thoughts but here’s an initial crack at an answer. In many ways, political offices and political campaigns are what you make of them. Just as in a legislative position, the effectiveness of a good LG is likely to depend on coalition building and effective organizing. In the case of the LG, being in sync with the governor and his/her agenda and the rest of the team is particularly important. A statewide campaign also gives me an opportunity to help set that agenda. In my case, I plan to spend the next year talking about poverty, inequality, and a number of other issues that are important to me, and trying to make sure that those issues are on the center stage. Here’s a bit more about why I’m running: https://medium.com/@qpalfrey/why-im-running-for-massachusetts-lieutenant-governor-d2572894a775
I’m also very eager to see Massachusetts take more of a leadership role in the resistance to Trump. I think Trump represents a particularly severe threat to our values and our culture as Americans, and I think that the best thing we can do to fight back right now is to work to elect Democrats to statewide seats and Congress in 2018. More on that here: https://medium.com/@qpalfrey/a-time-to-stand-up-fight-back-b3f7c191b939
Over the coming months, I’d love to offer some further thoughts on these issues and most importantly to listen to your thoughts on some answers. I strongly believe that campaigns should be focused on the grassroots from the start, and that’s the kind of campaign I’d like to build. https://medium.com/@qpalfrey/building-a-grassroots-campaign-from-the-start-c120c752431b
I look forward to continuing the conversation.
If anyone wants an economy that works for everyone, I suppose it would be good to know what has happened in the past and how we got to where we are.
Here’s a five minute talk from Phillip Blond that I recommend to anyone looking to make bold and significant changes that may actually result in an economy that works for all.
Interesting.
So the vision of Mr. Blond is that we remake society into a “Catholic economy” that recreates the sustenance lifestyle of medieval peasants.
Mr. Blond doesn’t, in this piece, elucidate what he means by the “Catholic” part of the “Catholic economy”, but he does complain about “secular” alternatives and introduces this piece as a “theological critique”. Mr. Blond is described as “Senior Lecturer on Philosophy and Theology”. So he apparently uses the word “Catholic” in its religious and theological sense (as opposed to small-c “catholic”, meaning “universal”).
I watched the entire piece. I saw much more of a critique of what doesn’t work than ideas of what does work. Mr. Blond is deafeningly silent about the role of women in his “Catholic economy”. We are left to speculate about what that means in the context of both the role of women in the Catholic church and the role of women in that sustenance existence as medieval peasants.
I don’t know about anyone else, but my own vision of an “economy that works for everyone” is more expansive than a sustenance existence as a 16th century peasant — especially for women.
These ideas are nice and I think people will broadly support them, but they’re not tackling head-on the real challenges MA faces in ending rampant inequality and the continued slide into poverty by many formerly middle class families.
The real things we need to address are infrastructure — both transportation and housing — as well as the rising costs of education, and the limited access the poor and middle class have to participate fully in our economy (ie to be able to startup a small business, or get around places outside Boston without needing to own a car, or be able to afford to live reasonably near where they work, etc.).
We should be making a massive investment into our transportation infrastructure. We should be radically changing zoning policy throughout the state to gut NIMBY zoning laws, especially in concert with that new transportation infrastructure. We should cut almost all corporate welfare going to wealthy, powerful corporations, and instead spend it on things like job training and small business grants for the middle class and poor — building up a diverse group of small business job incubators across the state, and not just attracting a few companies to Boston.
We should also be thinking about how the economy is rapidly changing, with more and more people being forced out of long term full time employment with decent pay and benefits, to short term contract work with no benefits or job protection, as well as the virtually unregulated ‘internet of things’ work like Uber that has been shown to only pay less than half of the minimum wage when expenses like gas and wear and tear to the car are taken into account.
Our state has shown no willingness to tackle these hard-decision issues, be it transportation, housing, thinking outside Boston, making college affordable or the shift towards contract and Uber-esque internet-of-things work.
And our state will only continue to impoverish more and more people, and force more and more people to move away, until it does something about these things.
Welcome back, we’ve missed your voice.
Your voice or reason is the refreshing oasis in the cacophonic desert of Know-Nothing ignorance we have been toiling these many days. 🙂