Date: Wed, 03 Apr 2002 12:21:42 -0500
From: Kit Mason <kit at hers.com>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: equal pay
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

Ron,

You're unnecessarily complicating the issue.  The question isn't whether
two McDonald's employees (for example) who work in separate cities
should be paid the same, but why two people who do exactly the same job
in the same building but have different genders should not be paid the
same wages.  This is not a matter of commissions, or of cost of living
in different places, but of fair treatment of people who do the same
work in the same place, with the same training and experience.  (And
yes, these jobs do exist, whether you believe that or not.)

Not every job in the world includes commissions or tips, or defines
productivity in terms of how many carburetors or hamburgers roll off the
assembly line or how many pairs of underwear are sold.  And your
employer who has one employee is a red herring, irrelevant to the
discussion entirely.

The obvious result of the law, however, is that employers who want to
continue to discriminate according to gender (or any other reason) just
have to redefine the job descriptions so that the jobs aren't precisely
the same, although for all intents and purposes they are de facto
identical.  Federal laws are only as good as the legal judgments that
enforce them in the workplace.

Am I cynical about this?  You bet.

Kit

ronkean at juno.com wrote:
> As a libertarian, I have to jump in here.  Workers who do the same job
> are not necessarily equally productive.  That's one reason why
> salespersons are often paid on commission.  Most jobs are not well suited
> to being put on a commission or piecework basis, even though such is
> probably the fairest way to pay workers, in theory.  Given the reality
> that it is not always practical to tie pay directly to productivity,
> employers should be free to reward their more productive workers with
> higher pay, according to their own judgement.  That is, in my view,
> consistent with justice, fairness, and economic efficiency.  A free
> market tends to produce winning results for society as a whole, and
> attempts to impose laws to equalize pay are based on a mistaken notion of
> justice, the idea that justice demands equality of outcomes.
>
> It costs something like twice as much (or more) to live in New York City
> as it does to live in Mississippi.  It does not make sense to demand that
> a cashier at a McDonalds restaurant in NYC be paid precisely the same
> wage as one doing that job in Mississippi, and indeed the market works to
> balance those differences.  McDonalds' workers in high cost/high wage
> locations are paid more.
>
> It would, I think, make better sense to advocate that men and women be
> paid equally after accounting for productivity and local market
> conditions, with gender making no difference.  That is, to advocate equal
> pay for equal work in the same market, rather equal pay for the same job
> description.  But the devil is in the details.  Trying to administer such
> a law would necessarily put the government in the business of deciding
> how much people should paid for their work.  Take, for example, the case
> of an employer who has just one employee, an employee who happens to be a
> woman.  How could we necessarily know how much that employer might offer
> to pay a man for the same work?
>
> Ron Kean

--

kit at hers.com
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