An editorial in today’s Washington Post describes it as “a flawed approach to job bias” that “would allow employees and courts to intrude too far into core business decisions,” and Jon Hyman rounds up some critical coverage in the employment-law blogosphere. Earlier here.
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Around the web, September 29…
MI’s Marie Gryphon: Congress shouldn’t force citizens to fly blind. [Wash. Examiner] Supreme Court cert grant in Astra v. County of Santa Clara, on whether there’s a private right of (class) action over pharmaceutical prices agreed to by HHS. [Santa…
It appears to me that the underlying goal of this piece of misguided legislation is to enshrine the theory of comparable worth into federal law. Comparable worth is the concept that a federal judge or an EEOC flunky can determine that totally dissimilar jobs can be assessed financial value. For example, a teacher has the same value as an oilrig worker even though the oilrig job is much more dangerous. And, since oilrig workers, who are 95% male, are paid much more than elementary school teachers, who are 85% female, under comparable worth this is gender discrimination.
In Berkeley, whenever the equal worth nuts opened up, I got seriously hated by suggesting someone start a business in a labor intensive industry. Hire only women and wipe out the competition.
No one ever did it.
It’s unlikely that the same company will ever employ both teachers and oil rig workers (to use David’s example). So ultimately, the only way the leftists will ever succeed in getting “comparable worth” is to start dictating pay scales to every employer. If you think I’m being alarmist, look at France and Germany, where it’s already happened and resulted in “structural” unemployment rates that amount to a permanent depression.
This is what’s in store for us if the likes of Obama and Pelosi stay in power, or ever return to power.
David Smith: In one of John Stossel’s books, he relates the story of a guy who tried just that: hired only women, figuring that would give him the profit margin he needed to blow everyone else away. Didn’t work, of course.