To: WSFAlist at keithlynch.net
Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2002 23:41:46 -0500
Subject: [WSFA] Re: equal pay
From: ronkean at juno.com
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

On Wed, 03 Apr 2002 12:21:42 -0500 Kit Mason <kit at hers.com> writes:
> 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.

It would arguably be irrational to pay people unequally based purely on
gender, if all else is equal, and if gender were not itself relevant to
the job.  But if productivity differs from worker to worker, that could
be a rational basis for unequal pay for the same job.  Trying to ban
irrational behavior begs the moral question of whether people have the
right to be a bit irrational with their own resources, and raises the
practical objection that opinions and perceptions about what is rational
and fair may honestly differ.

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.

Most jobs, as you suggest, are not well-suited to being paid on
commission, piecework, or by tips, so the employer is left to estimate
productivity and quality of work.  Employment should be a voluntary
relationship.  The employee is selling labor, and the employer is buying
labor.  The terms of the transaction should be freely negotiable.  Both
the employer and the employee should be free to agree to mutually
acceptable terms.

> And your
> employer who has one employee is a red herring, irrelevant to the
> discussion entirely.
>

It was offered as an example of the practical difficulty of enforcing
equal pay mandates.

> 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
>

I don't see the U.S. as being chock full of employers scheming to pay
women workers less than the men, but such an employer would be making a
bad business decision, in part because it would bad for morale.  As I
understand economics, wages in a free market tend to be set by the forces
of supply and demand, and employers who insist on making irrational wage
offers are working against their own economic success.

Ron Kean

.

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