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Promoting Full Employment for Lawyers and Bureaucrats

By Doug Bandow on 7.20.10 @ 8:58AM

The Obama administration is committed to job creation. For lawyers and bureaucrats.

The latest proposed boost for America's leading economic parasites is the president's endorsement of new legislation to promote pay "equity." Reports USA Today:

President Obama plans to press Congress today to pass pay-equity legislation that would make it easier for women to sue employers who pay them less than their male counterparts, the White House said Monday.

"Women deserve equal pay," White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said in an interview, citing government statistics that show women earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn. "It's a very fundamental right."

Obama will announce his support for the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill that has languished in Congress for several years. In 2007, President Bush warned he would veto the bill, and it has been stalled by opposition from some Republicans and business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

It's long been against the law to discriminate in paying workers. What the president wants to do is engage in social engineering. Valerie Jarrett is smart enough to know that the 77 cents figure is meaningless, since most of the difference reflects different work patterns. Women are, for instance, more likely to take time off for family reasons. This legislationactually would encourage unequal pay for political purposes.

But the administration obviously sees no reason to let facts get in the way of a nice pay-off to lawyers and bureaucrats. After all, there isn't much job growth anywhere else in the economy!

View all comments (2) | Leave a comment

Male Matters| 7.21.10 @ 10:08AM

Employers are generally seen as greedy profit mongers. If they could get away with paying women less than men for the same work, they'd fire all the men and hire only women.

Despite feminist groups' 40-year-old demand for equal wages for women, millions of married women still choose to have no wages at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of The Secrets of Happily Married Women, stay-at-home wives, including those who are childless, constitute a growing niche. "In the past few years,” he says in a CNN August 2008 report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier....” at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka.)

As full-time mothers or homemakers, these women earn zero wages. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living lives of luxury? Virtually any teenager knows the answer: “They are supported by their husband.”

So if millions of wives can work for zero wages, millions of other wives can work for low wages in full-time or part-time work, can refuse overtime and promotions, can take more unpaid days off — all the while lowering women's average pay — all because they are supported by husbands who must earn more than if they'd remained bachelors — which is how MEN help create the wage gap.

Consider this: The Next Equal Occupational Fatality Day is in 2020. The year 2020 is how far into the future women will have to work to experience the same number of work-related deaths that men experienced in 2009 alone.

bill| 7.23.10 @ 2:37PM

The funny thing is that the US Department of Labor hired CONRAD, a research group in Pittsburgh to do a study on the wage gap. The results? There is no wage gap! Women make less due to a variety of factors, primarily choices and failure to negotiate higher pay. women are not denied equal pay. women CHOOSE to earn less.