November 19, 2015
If there
is to be a Hillary Clinton presidency, its officials will frequently consult “Closing
the Pay Gap and Beyond: A comprehensive strategy for improving economic
security for women and families.”
Issued
by the Economic
Policy Institute (EPI), the 31-page document is stuffed with liberal
fables, distortions, and banalities. Its first half-lie is especially
egregious. “The gender wage gap,” thunder authors Alyssa Davis and Elise Gould,
“is a persistent economic problem.” In 2014, they claim, the median hourly wage
of distaffers was $15.21, “82.9 percent that of the median man.”
Sort of
true. But basically, irrelevant. Ladies and gents work in different ways, in
different intensities, in different professions. As the American Enterprise
Institute’s Christina
Hoff Sommers observed, “Women, far more than men, appear to be drawn to
jobs in the caring professions; and men are more likely to turn up in
people-free zones.” Engineering pays more than day care. Chemists earn more
than social workers. And a computer-science degree is far likelier to be
lucrative than a sheepskin in theater. Call it unfair, but that’s the market --
not systemic bias against women in the workplace.
The type
of job matters, but so does the amount of time dedicated to it. June
O’Neill, an economist at Baruch College, concluded that the “most important
source of the gender wage gap is that women assume greater responsibility for
child-rearing than men. That influences women’s extent and continuity of work,
which affects women’s skills and therefore wages. In addition, women often seek
flexible work schedules, less stressful work environments, and other conditions
compatible with meeting the demands of family responsibilities. Those come at a
price -- namely, lower wages.” Once again, biology trumps feminists’ hectoring
about the need to “empower” women.
“Closing
the Pay Gap and Beyond” unintentionally acknowledges the tradeoff women make
toward caregiving by recommending that one way to “eliminate the gender wage
gap” is “changing the culture of work to emphasize work-life balance.” (No
explanation of just how much doing so would cost employers.) Other “solutions”
include “deterring the segregation of genders into specific occupations,”
“strongly enforcing antidiscrimination laws,” and “passing comparable-worth
laws.”
Compounding
their myth-perpetuation, Davis and Gould leave the gals behind, and broaden
their scope to the “gap … between typical workers’ compensation and
economy-wide productivity growth.” The linkage, it’s claimed, was “decoupled”
in 1979. Since the
year disco died, productivity has risen by 239 percent, while hourly
compensation grew by only 109 percent.
Dig down
into the stats a bit, however, and the disparity begins to dissolve. First,
only the pay and benefits of “production/nonsupervisory workers in the private
sector” is examined. That leaves out managers, the self-employed, and
government employees -- no small portion of the labor force. And, as always
with Robert Reich-approved
“analysis,” the roles of taxes and income-redistribution programs are ignored.
In other words, EPI’s compensation-productivity factoid can’t be trusted.
No
matter. Bereft of credibility, the crusade against voluntary exchange between
workers and employers rolls on. “Closing the Pay Gap and Beyond” seeks an end
to “the widespread erosion of collective bargaining.” (Even though right-to-work
states are booming.) It favors an increase in the federal minimum wage to
“$12.00 by 2020.” (Even though many centrist and liberal economists understand
that minimum-wage boosts cause unemployment.) And it endorses an assault on a
new moonbat bugaboo: “irregular
scheduling.”
With the
Center
for Popular Democracy in the lead, liberals have launched a nationwide
consciousness-raising session over “variable and unpredictable work hours.”
Such inexcusable meanness “makes it very difficult for workers to care for
their family or arrange outside child care, and creates work-family stress.”
Even worse, “children of parents with irregular work schedules are more likely
to have cognitive and behavioral challenges.”
The
answer, of course, is another mandate. Employers, EPI finger-wags, “should be
required to use fairer scheduling practices, such as providing more advance
notice in setting and changing work schedules, and to pay workers who have not
received sufficient notice of last-minute schedule changes for hours lost, for
‘on-call hours,’ for being scheduled on split shifts, and for instances in
which they are sent home before completing their assigned shifts.”
What
this undeniably weak recovery needs, “progressives” believe, is another round
of regulations. Dodd-Frank,
Obamacare, expensive rules for nonexistent environmental “benefits,” the war on
affordable energy -- good, but not enough. Sweeping micromanagement of
employers in all sectors is the path
to worker prosperity.
On the
left, gender politics and capitalism-bashing remain preferable to finding
policies that will get America, Inc. growing again.
D. Dowd Muska (www.dowdmuska.com) writes about government, economics, and technology. Follow him on Twitter @dowdmuska.
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