I was going to write a straight up post about how the Washington State House passed the Equal Pay Opportunity Act. Modeled on what some other states are doing, it would make it easier for employees to compare wages.
“This pay transparency allows employees the opportunity – the very information they need – to identify and challenge practices that lead to discrimination,” she said.
Washington’s working women make about 77 cents for every dollar men make.
In fact, a recent study released by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce found that the median salary for women in Washington state is $41,300, while the median salary for men is $53,000.
Awesome job House!
That said, I was going to start this post with a similar intro to the minimum wage post. Namely, that it’s a great, and vital, and necessary thing that the Senate is most likely either not going to take up or if it does that it won’t pass, or — best case — water down significantly. And I wonder if we’re getting these sort of things passed in the House (guns excluded) because they have no chance of passing the Senate.
What I mean is, they want to get lefty voters like the writers and many readers of this blog excited. We’re doing everything we can on raising the minimum wage and making sure there’s equal pay for women, and we passed Reproductive Health Act. Yes!
But they can turn around to the business community and let them know well your minimum wage isn’t raised and you don’t have to do anything new for equal pay for women, so don’t worry. They can turn to the insurance industry and let them know they don’t have to pay for abortions or other reproductive care. And I wonder if it would have been tougher to pass these things in the House if Democrats controlled the Senate. I mean women weren’t being paid equally when Democrats controlled both chambers. The Reproductive Parity Act didn’t become law when they had both chambers.
None of this is to say that activists should despair. Contact your legislator. Push your Senator to actually pass these things. Sometimes something will surprise you! Work to elect more and better Democrats. But honestly, I’d like to see some proof that this isn’t just pandering.
While I’m wholly sympathetic to, and supportive of, the principle of “equal pay for equal work,” a bit of caution is in order as to how you crunch the raw data. Pay should be gender neutral, but if men on average fill more arduous and hazardous jobs than women, then perhaps their median pay should be a bit higher. A person who climbs a 2,000-foot-high radio mast to replace beacon bulbs should get paid more than someone who answers phones. Pouring concrete or moving furniture is harder work than ringing up retail sales and should pay more. But a female cop should get the same pay as a male cop. The most important key, I think, to pay equality is breaking glass ceilings and opening up occupations like doctor, lawyer, accountant, manager, banker, etc., to qualified women. Less than 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women and I can see no logical reason for that.
Equal pay for equal work… Tell that to Obummer’s whitey house dudes!
The problem is the Washington state voters have created a conundrum by putting two separate parties into power in the separate houses. Perhaps we should have a unicameral legislature so this can’t happen. At the moment both houses can pass stuff that has no chance of passing the other house. The Senate would be totally screwed if they couldn’t pass their own bills and only cold act on bills passed by the house.
On the reproductive thing. I think most insurance industry has a problem with paying for abortions or other reproductive care. IN fact they want to pay for it. Abortions are cheap compared to births. And if the baby is going to have major health problems on being born those costs go away. Arguable the industry should argue for the ability to demand abortions if you honestly think there is such a thing as death panels. Paying for reproductive health for all the years a woman can have children is cheaper than paying the costs of a birth. So your argument doesn’t hold water though some religious hospitals may not want to provide those services. Which is why state and federal government should step in to insure all citizens have access to the same services at those hospitals they would have at any general hospital. Or those religious hospitals don’t need to deliver babies. No religious hospital that I know of limits who can go there to their faith which is the only way they could have a true argument that they can provide only reproductive services that result in babies.
Equal pay for equal work does exist particularly in government. Industries with good union representation or management who don’t just pay lip service to employees being valued or even family.
I do think @1 makes a very valid point though. I do think it’s hard to get women into wanting to work in certain industries and this is true for men as well. When men and woman go in equal numbers to volunteer for the army then we will be an egalitarian society. Or when we can get a more equal number of women more willing to go up to the top of the Space Needle to swap out the light bulbs, and for men to let them do the work they are capable of, and not be overly protective beyond what every member of that crew should be toward anyone on the crew. We aren’t there, and maybe we will never get there, but all the issues of “Antigone” are still here today and will continue as long as we humans walk the Earth.
PS I don’t think the CEO of McDonald’s works anywhere as hard as the guy doing the fries or flipping the hamburgers, or many of the other positions at a McDonald’s. Yet somehow I’m supposed to believe they work as hard as 300 or more of these folks based on the pay discrepancy. These CEO’s must be superhuman and should be able to cure all of man kinds ills, save us all from falling trees and still have time to save kittens that don’t need saving from trees.