McCain Against Equal Pay
April 26, 2008 by Tracee Sioux
Filed under Parenting
McCain helped defeat the Fair Pay Act this week - which concerns your pay check and that guy in the cube next to you.
If you have the same education and training as the guy next to you, you’re making less money. Here’s a statistical fact: If you’re a childless woman you make 73 cents to his dollar. If you’re a mother you make only 60 cents to his dollar.
The Fair Pay Act would have allowed you to sue your company for discrimination for this inequality.
McCain says he doesn’t think our lack of pay equity this is “fair.” But he also doesn’t think you deserve to be allowed to do anything about it.
As reported on Foxnews.com McCain thinks you should go back to school because Equal training, education and experience isn’t going to cut it in his patriarchal world. Evidently he thinks women should have to have MORE training, education and experience than their male counterparts to make the same dollar. That or he’s confused about what the word “same” means.
McCain stated his opposition to the bill as he campaigned in rural eastern Kentucky, where poverty is worse among women than men. The Arizona senator said he was familiar with the disparity but that there are better ways to help women find better paying jobs.
“They need the education and training, particularly since more and more women are heads of their households, as much or more than anybody else,” McCain said. “And it’s hard for them to leave their families when they don’t have somebody to take care of them.
“It’s a vicious cycle that’s affecting women, particularly in a part of the country like this, where mining is the mainstay; traditionally, women have not gone into that line of work, to say the least,” he said.
Hey McCain - same means it compares a teacher to a teacher and a minor to a miner not a teacher to a miner. Maybe you should read the bills before you screw half the population.
Yeah, McCain I can see why you find lawsuits unpleasant. No one likes them.
I have to point out though - if you and your boys’ club were OFFERING to pay us THE SAME for the SAME work - we wouldn’t feel compelled to sue you.
Momsrising has a clever response. They’re asking women to send their resumes in just to prove that yeah - we went to the effort to getting those educations, training and experience and we’re still not being paid the SAME!
Image: www.thewashingtonnote.com
Just a thought… but if I were a business leader, why would I hire a man at $40,000 when I could hire a woman for $30,000? I mean, it is just not cost effective strategy to pay someone higher based on gender. Second… these statistics, believe it or not, group secretaries with lawyers and doctors and engineers. There are more men in the higher paying fields then women, so therefore their wage would be higher. Third… women trade pay for other lifestyle benefits where it is hard to measure an economic cost… such as flex time, a more generous leave or health benefit package, better hours, the ability to work at home… show us what “statistical fact” you are citing, though I’m guessing you’re citing the US Dept of Labor, Bureau of Labor Stats CPS survey, (which follows the parameters I just laid out) and you are grossly misinterpreting data.
Same - look it up. This bill was about same education, training, hours, experience.
The reason an employer would do it is sexism Liz. It’s not logical or rational it’s prejudice.
My source is http:www.momsrising.org.
If there is no inequality, then passing a law to ensure it should be no problem.
True That.
I love that flattering picture you found of him..Nice
frankly, businesses are always compelled to adhere to certain standards that don’t support their bottom line. this is why we have safety standards, established working hours, some of us have health benefits and we enjoy weekends and holidays.
so to require a company to pay their employees equally might make the accountants shudder but it’s not a crazy idea and not unthought of.
further, if private and public firms aren’t also, theoretically, allowed to discriminate against their employees based on race, religion and orientation then they shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate based on gender.
and pay equity is *all* about gender. it’s not about salaries or putting a company in the red; it’s about the fact that someone has a uterus and someone doesn’t think she deserves to be paid for her labor.
until we start thinking of gender as within the same classes as race, religion and sexual orientation, achieving pay equity is that much more difficult.
and, frankly, supporting pay equity is a step in the right direction if anyone was interested in eliminating poverty. if every woman was paid the same as her male counterpart (this is what ‘comparable’ means) then poverty rates would decrease by half for single mothers and married women.
(Source: Mid America Institute on Poverty, Heartland Alliance)
a good book to read about the depth of pay inequity and the different ways that women are systematically discriminated against is ‘Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men and What They Can Do About It’ by Evelyn Murphy.
sorry for the long comment; i totally stumbled here and i liked it.
Thank Goodness someone else understands that you can’t hate women on welfare AND be against equal pay because pay inequity causes higher welfare rates. Duh.
I love you - please stay.
I’d have to read the entire bill, but it doesn’t sound like something I would support.
What if someone has lots of training and experience, yet they sleep on the job or just plain old don’t perform? Do they deserve more pay than someone who who may have less training and experience yet works much harder and accomplishes more? (regardless of sex)
Its illogical for employers to pay someone less just because of their sex (or their training or their experience)., This bill will cause more injustice than it attempts to solve.
Employers should be hiring, firing, and setting pay without regard to the sex, color, national origin, sexual orientation of their employees. Instead an employee treatment should be judged solely on the worth of that employee to the employer. Government should also be blind to a persons sex, etc. However, this is something that no piece of legislation will fix without causing other injustices.
Whether it’s illogical or not employers pay women less than they do males doing the same job. Mainly because women are willing to do it and they save a quarter for ever dollar they pay them. (Which is kind of logical if your interest is entirely monetary.)
Everyone should be blind. But no one is. This has negative monetary consequences for women.
Because no one is gender blind or color blind the need for laws and lawsuits arise. If they were color or gender blind - there would be no need for such things.
What really gets me mad is that I’m only 14 and by the time its time for me to get a job, they still wont have anything to prevent employers from paying women less. I mean, this is the decade of change…of breaking all steryotypes! How are women supposed to support themselves and/or their families if our nation is going into a depression and women are still being paid less?
You tell me, McCain. You IDIOT!