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191 search results for: equal pay

1

Relentless Perpetuation of the “Equal Pay” Myth via Legislation

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Helpful headlines notwithstanding, the Rhode Island Senate once again passed legislation to address the mythical “wage gap”:

A plan to close the gender wage gap in Rhode Island by adding new, sharper teeth to the state’s fair pay law and banning employers from asking job candidates their salary history sailed through the state Senate again Thursday.

“Rhode Island first passed an equal pay law in the 1950s, and I am sure it was revolutionary at the time, but we have not gone back and updated it unlike many other states,” said Sen. Gayle Goldin, lead sponsor of the pay equity legislation. “Passing this bill is not going to resolve the wage gap on its own, rather, this bill in combination with so many things we have worked on… is the way we will address the gender wage gap.”

And so it goes.  As long as progressives want to foster division and grievance, this legislation will keep appearing.  Maybe some year the gears of political necessity will get it over the finish line.  As that process plays on from year to year, opponents will tire of saying the same thing over and over again.  That’s the advantage of the left-wing approach to public “debate”:  When you refuse to acknowledge the other side’s arguments and just keep repeating the talking points, the other side moves to other topics, and the public just becomes used to the deception.

By way of a preventative measure, here’s my op-ed on the topic, from the Providence Journal last year around this time, which I published in more casual, expansive form in this space the month before:

Plainly put, this gives the government power to investigate just about any business and dictate changes to its pay policies, because the only pay differentials that wouldn’t have legal risks would be those between people of the same race, religion, sex, orientation, gender identity, disability, age, and nationality.  That is, for any two employees who aren’t more or less demographically identical, the lower-paid one could initiate a complaint with the state with the same treatment as complaints that the employer withheld pay, and the burden is on the employer to explain it and to prove that no other business practice could erase it.

Think about how much of an encroachment on private activity and interactions that is, as well as the presumption that government is some sort of neutral judge that can accurately assess every business decision.

If this legislation ever passes, I expect it will have some degree of the same effect as the ill-advised paid leave legislation which progressives did manage to pass last yearl.

2

Equal Pay Is Dead, Long Live Equal Pay

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The news is everywhere in Rhode Island media that the Rhode Island Senate will not consider the House version of the “equal pay” legislation:

The day began with a pronouncement by the Senate that the “pay equity” bill — which tied the House in knots before a 64-to-9 vote of approval the previous night — was dead on arrival in the Senate, which had passed a much further-reaching bill earlier in the year.

“The Senate prioritized pay equity this session,″ said Senate spokesman Greg Pare. “On April 10, national ‘Equal Pay Day,’ the Senate passed strong legislation to address wage gaps in the workplace. The legislation the House passed last night does not reflect the Senate’s commitment to ensuring equal pay for comparable work and meaningful change for women’s economic security.

“The Senate will not be considering the House bill.”

So, even though the two versions of the bill have substantial overlap, if one chamber doesn’t pass the other chamber’s version, that’s that.  A cynic (which can, with only mild cynicism, be defined as “somebody who has observed the Rhode Island General Assembly for a while”) might wonder how choreographed this performance was.

Prioritizing the issue was an early and somewhat surprising point of emphasis for Senate President Dominick Ruggerio.  This outcome gives him progressive cover, while giving House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello pro-business creds for his first election after nearly being unseated by a conservative challenger, all in the muddy mix of a legislative process that makes it difficult to blame anybody in particular.

Rhode Islanders should welcome the results, though.  The Senate legislation was a radical nightmare that was arguably only in part about reducing a wage gap between men and women, and the notion that discrimination is creating an unfair differential in pay is a myth.  In other words, forcing its mandates on the economy would create a regulatory environment that would be unfair to businesses and to employees whose work would be devalued in order to adjust pay rates that are not based on discrimination as it is.

The inability of the General Assembly’s two chambers to come up with common legislation will now move the issue past the November election, which may very well take some of the hot air out of the narrative’s sails, one way or another.

3

“Equal Pay”: From the Radical to the Uselessly Disruptive

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Fortuitously, the Providence Journal ran an op-ed by me explaining how insanely radical proposed equal pay legislation actually is:

This legislation must, therefore, be about something other than simple fairness in the workplace. Sure enough, the biggest piece making this legislation so radical is its broad scope — going well beyond the battle of the sexes. Indeed, the “equal pay” umbrella extends to the categories of “race or color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability, age, or country of ancestral origin,” covering all “comparable work, when viewed as a composite of skill, effort, and responsibility, and performed under similar working conditions.”

Plainly put, this gives the government power to investigate just about any business and dictate changes to its pay policies, because the only pay differences that wouldn’t have legal risks would be those between people of the same race, religion, sex, orientation, gender identity, disability, age, and nationality. For any two employees who aren’t more or less demographically identical, the lower-paid one could initiate a complaint with the state with the same weight as complaints that the employer withheld pay. The law explicitly puts the burden on the employer to explain it and to prove that no other business practice could erase the difference, even if it’s innocent.

Today, the Rhode Island House will consider an amended version of the bill that gives reason to think that some legislators are not quite as crazy as the original bill would require them to be.  House 7427A limits the scope of the bill to race and gender, exempts companies under 18 employees, and reduces employers’ liability in a variety of ways.

The question now is why the legislature is passing anything at all.  Existing law already covers such things, so all this bill will do is create some new regulatory burdens with unproven legal language that may have unintended consequences.

The only explanation is political: that politicians want to be able to say they did something, even if they did nothing good in practical reality.  This gives momentum to the people who are manipulating the cultural narrative while tangling up Rhode Islanders who are doing their best just to support their families and move our society forward.

5

Once Again with the Plain Rebuttal to “Equal Pay Day”

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Well, as long as people are willing to repeat discredited and obvious nonsense like the “Equal Pay Day” rhetoric, I suppose we’ll have to continue to recite the obvious responses.  Mary Katharine Ham has apparently drawn the short straw this time around:

These differing priorities understandably impact pay. Women are more likely to take a job that pays less to gain flexibility and work-life balance. I’ve done it myself many times.

Yet, as AEI’s Mark Perry points out, there is no widespread recognition of “Equal Occupational Fatality Day” to highlight men’s overrepresentation in very dangerous fields (coal mining, line work, and law enforcement among them), which often pay more to compensate for risk. …

There is no big “Equal Commute Day,” to acknowledge the gender commute gap …

Male college graduates, on average, also entertain employment options further afield from their universities than do women, thereby opening up more and possibly higher-paying opportunities. They also work several hours more per week on average than women.

Maybe I’m just idealizing the past, but it seems like talking points used to go away when they were shown to be utterly without merit.  In today’s polarized society, the strategy seems more to keep pressing on because the risk of losing one’s base is so much more substantial than the risk of never being able to persuade after a loss of credibility.

7

Allowing Candor on Tennis Pay Equality

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Here’s a confession: One reason I’m looking forward to the end of the legislative session in Rhode Island this year is that I’ll be able to clear out my news feed and stop paying such close attention to issues related to specific bills.  Near the top of the list of topics I’ll be happy not to watch so closely is the matter of “equal pay.”

It’s not that the question isn’t an important one to answer or that it doesn’t raise very interesting philosophical questions; the problem is that so few of the articles or essays that flit across my computer screen address the actual questions, much less the interesting ones.  The progressive assertions and statistics are simply taken at face value.  More than maybe any other issue I’ve followed, this one marches along with a moral certainty that never bothers to wonder why people would be doing things that would be obviously wrong if they were really doing them.

Tennis pro Rafael Nadal stumbled right into the path of this intractable march when he suggested, in response to a direct question, that the pay rates of men and women in professional tennis is “a comparison we shouldn’t even make”:

Female models earn more than male models and nobody says anything. Why? Because they have a larger following. In tennis too, who gathers a larger audience earns more.

Pause for a moment and put aside the identity politics and the ideological war.  When an athlete has a large audience, isn’t it reasonable for that athlete to receive more of the financial rewards?  Isn’t this the same as musicians or other performers?  If we take the identifying quality of sex out of it, nobody would be incensed that stronger, more-aggressive competitors attract larger audiences and more money.  Those who elevate a tangential quality are the ones bringing sex into it.

I haven’t seen any indication that Nadal was saying that the pay difference is just the natural order of the universe and ought to be maintained as a matter of principle.  He was just making a plain statement of fact.  If the audience changes, then the pay should and will.  Anybody who wants to achieve a world in which people are as interested in female tennis as male tennis should work toward that end, but attacking it pay rate first sows division and is unfair to players currently in the game.

9

Chariho Teachers Deserve our Respect…..So do the Taxpayers Who Pay the Bills

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EDITOR’S NOTE: You can watch Louise Dinsmore’s recent appearances as a guest on The Current’s In The Dugout with Mike Stenhouse video podcasts here and here.  **** As a parent whose child attended Richmond Elementary School from K-3, I witnessed the love, dedication and professionalism of Chariho teachers and teaching support staff.   There is […]

10

Taxpayer Funded Abortions Back On The Agenda in RI

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Bill Would Fund Abortions for State Employees and Medicaid Recipients Abortion Advocate Claims Failure to Fund Abortions with State Tax Dollars is “Discriminatory and Racist” PROVIDENCE – On the second day of the new legislative session in Democrat-dominated Rhode Island, publicly-funded abortion-coverage for state employees and Medicaid recipients is back in play. On Thursday, Rep. […]

11

Not Quite as Unequal as Advertised

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TaxProf Blog’s Paul Caron highlights an important point from a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Phil Gramm and John Early:

The published census data for 2017 portray the top quintile of households as having almost 17 times as much income as the bottom quintile. But this picture is false. The measure fails to account for the one-third of all household income paid in federal, state and local taxes. Since households in the top income quintile pay almost two-thirds of all taxes, ignoring the earned income lost to taxes substantially overstates inequality.

The Census Bureau also fails to count $1.9 trillion in annual public transfer payments to American households. The bureau ignores transfer payments from some 95 federal programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, which make up more than 40% of federal spending, along with dozens of state and local programs. Government transfers provide 89% of all resources available to the bottom income quintile of households and more than half of the total resources available to the second quintile.

Teasing the direct wealth redistribution our government imposes on the economy out of the equation changes the picture dramatically.  Click over and look at the included chart.  Adding wealth transfers to those in the lowest quintile moves their average income from nearly zero to over $50,000, while removing taxation from the top quintile drops their average income from nearly $300,000 per year to less than $200,000.

This is a nifty trick from progressives that might just slip past folks’ notice or might be deliberately obscured.  Government takes action to correct a presumed problem but then doesn’t account for the correction in future years, so it looks as if the problem never changes.

In fact, it might appear to get worse!  In this case, for example, it wouldn’t be surprising to find that progressive taxation actually leads to a bigger difference between earned income (not including transfers).  After all, the higher taxes are, the more companies have to pay at the high end in order to produce the same take-home-pay, and the more progressive the tax structure is, the less incentive workers have to take higher paying jobs that carry more responsibility or require more investment in credentials and such, so the more pressure there will be to maintain or increase take-home pay.

If reducing the gap in earned income is really the goal (which I think it should be), then a redistributive tax structure is exactly the wrong way to go about it.

12

Taxpayers “Share” Their Bicycles in Providence

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The mayor’s office tells The Current that a $400,000 TIGER grant of federal taxpayer money from the Rhode Island Department of Transportation enabled Providence’s new bike sharing program:

JUMP, which is owned by the ride sharing company Uber, has bike-share programs in six other U.S. cities. The City of Providence, along with Lifespan, Tufts Health Plan and the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority, sponsored JUMP’s Providence launch. …

Four hundred JUMP bikes will be available throughout the city in August, said Victor Morente, spokesman for Mayor Elorza’s office. Riders will be able to park and pick up bikes at 46 stations as well as at public bike racks. …

Bikes will be available for rent at $2 for every 30 minutes of riding. Memberships will also be available for $20 per month for 60 minutes of ride time a day. JUMP will offer reduced-cost memberships to people with low incomes.

As always, with such programs, the first question is why some entrepreneur didn’t find it worth the $1,000-per-bike investment to get this project off the ground.  The answer may be that, even at the highest price point ($4 per hour), every single bike will have to be ridden for more than 31 hours to pay for itself, and that’s if we assume no maintenance or replacement costs.  Moreover, the business model must require that some percentage of the bikes not be used at any given time, or else nobody would be willing to rely on their availability.

In short, the use of other people’s money (taxpayers) was probably the only way to overcome doubts about the demonstrated demand.  When the local Walmart will sell an adult bike for $100, most people who want them can find them.  With the subsidy, most of each sale can be profit for as long as the bikes last.

Those profits come at somebody else’s expense.  In San Francisco (with its better, more-predictable weather), JUMP bikes are cannibalizing Uber business.  The company claims to be happy about the exchange, but each lost Uber ride is a driver with no customer.  The subsidy could also block other innovations; an entrepreneur who was working on an app to allow people to share their own bikes (i.e., without the huge up-front investment for any one company) now has to compete with more-expensive, pedal-assisted bikes.

In the effort to make us behave as government wants us to be have, however, sacrificing the livelihoods and opportunities of a few unseen people is a small price to pay.

ADDENDUM (10:13 a.m., 7/21/18):

By the way, anybody who’s still having difficulty understanding how government involvement in the market produces income inequality should consider this to be an example.  The bicycles used for this offering are constructed in a largely automated process (presumably) and “shared” through an app that requires minimal human involvement, so customers’ money is flowing to the top of the income ladder, probably in distant states or countries.  Meanwhile, local Uber and taxi drivers lose customers, as do any small bike-rental shops or other actual Rhode Islanders who might offer some service that this tramples.

14

Confusion on “Pay Equity”

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It’s difficult not to feel as if you’re missing something while reading Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce President Laurie White’s recent op-ed in the Providence Journal.  On the one hand, she insists that “[e]nsuring pay equity is crucial for organizations to function successfully” and offers some suggestions for legislation currently working through the General Assembly.  On the other hand, she lists ways companies can achieve “pay equity” without “government overreach.”

The impression, overall, is that White is signaling that some tweaks to the legislation could be enough for her organization to sign on as supporters, but that she has to take a tone of opposition for the benefit of her members.

The whole debate, however, has this feel of missing something, at least in Rhode Island.  For starters, the wage gap is a myth.  It isn’t real.  Remove from the equation factors that should legitimately affect pay (like career choice, hours worked, and so on) and it evaporates.  White’s op-ed doesn’t go there, but she does proclaim that “pay equity” is critical for businesses to function.  If that’s the case, then why would they discriminate?

Another consideration that conveniently gets left out of this discussion is that Rhode Island already has laws against sex-based discrimination.  Without actual evidence of a systemic effort to skirt those laws, making them more stringent is a reckless imposition.

Of course, reckless imposition appears to be the real objective, inasmuch as the most significant action of the legislation on the table is to expand existing sex-based-discrimination law to cover just about every identity group.  Why is nobody acknowledging that reality?

Out of homage to political correctness, nobody seems to want to address the lies at the center of this debate.  Consequently, they’re conducting this surreal discussion as if debating how best to patch a roof that isn’t leaking.  Meanwhile, the foundation of our society is eroding and Rhode Island’s economic walls are crumbling — notwithstanding the governor’s frantic efforts to board them up with corrupt hand-outs.

Well might the Providence Chamber’s members be concerned about this issue, not the least because their spokeswoman is inevitably setting them up by failing to insisting that the state government legislate from within reality.

16

The Inequality Narrative

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Not to pick on Ted Nesi, because he’s only trying to promote his work using a click-bait political narrative, but I had to ask him what the insinuation was when he tweeted that “just 5 of RI’s 27 best-funded politicians are women.”  Do people who attempt to buy Rhode Island politicians put sexism before corruption?  Or do fewer women run for office?  Or are the specific women who are currently politicians in Rhode Island not as effective at or interested in fundraising?

Nevermind.  Let’s all just assume sexism.

The problem is that such statements are part of what turns straight reporting of the news into another brick in the wall of a political narrative serving one side — in this case, the glass-ceiling-breaking Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (who will enter office with a large percentage of the population thinking she’s the archetype of corruption and thinking more of the cliché to “break glass in case of emergency”).  The entire inequality narrative, as Thomas Sowell argues, ought to be retired before it does anymore divisive harm:

People like Hillary Clinton can simply grab a statistic about male–female income differences and run with it, since her purpose is not truth but votes. The real question, however, is whether, or to what extent, those income differences are due to employers paying women and men different wages for doing the very same jobs, for the very same amount of time.

We do not need to guess about such things. Many studies have been done over many years — and they repeatedly show that women and men who work the very same hours in the very same jobs at the very same levels of skill and experience do not have the pay gaps that people like Hillary Clinton loudly denounce.

As far back as 1971, single women in their thirties who had worked continuously since high school earned slightly more than men of the same description. As far back as 1969, academic women who had never married earned more than academic men who had never married.

For the foreseeable future, I’m afraid, “equality” for women will continue to mean that women must have all the same positive outcomes as men, no matter what decisions they make.  If that doesn’t sound like “equality” to you, clearly you need to be reeducated.

23

Taxes Up, Inequality Up, Too

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If the system that brought us to our current state of inequality is the “fool me once,” increasing taxes across the board would be “fool me squared.”

24

Freedom… From the Progressive Point of View

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Perhaps the most clarifying statement in Rhode Island politics, recently, came from one of the candidates now involved with Matt Brown’s Political Cooperative (which, despite the name, is not an alt-country band):

“Thought I may be the epitome of the American dream I cannot sit around and watch while many of my brothers and sisters are denied a shot at that very dream,″ said Jonathan Acosta, tracing his own story from “first generation American born to undocumented migrants from Colombia″ to the Ivy League.

“I believe that we are not free until we have dismantled structural inequality, developed sustainable clean energy, enacted a $15 minimum wage that pays equal pay for equal work, extended healthcare for all, provide[d] affordable housing, ensured quality public education starting at Pre-K, undergone campaign finance reform, criminal justice reform, and implemented sensible gun control,″ said Acosta, running for the Senate seat currently held by Elizabeth Crowley, D-Central Falls.

So, to Mr. Acosta, we’re not free until we’ve taken from some categories of people to give to others, limited people’s energy options to benefit fashionable technologies, forbidden employers and employees from setting a mutually agreeable value on work to be done, taken money from some people in order to pay for others’ health care (as defined by a vote-buying government) and/or put price controls on what providers can charge, placed restrictions on who can live where and what they can build, tightened the regulation of politics with limits on the donations and privacy of those who become politically active, and reduced the rights guaranteed under the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution.

If that doesn’t match your understanding of “freedom,” you’re not alone.  Indeed, by its mission, this “cooperative” is cooperating against anybody whose understanding of freedom differs, because it cannot possibly cooperate with anybody who disagrees.  You simply can’t hold a definition of freedom that doesn’t have satisfactory outcomes for the interest groups that progressives have targeted.

25

Take Hodges Badge Departure as Another Warning Sign

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As Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo spins Rhode Island’s economic numbers and the news media touts her “wooing” of blockchain companies, an article  from the Newport Daily News a couple of weeks ago hasn’t gotten much attention:

Hodges Badge Co. Inc. has made the “difficult decision” to close its Portsmouth plant this November and consolidate production at its Washington, Missouri, facility, according to a company statement.

“Hodges Badge Company Inc. is a 98-year-old family-owned company and we consider each one of our employees as part of our extended family,” according to the statement attributed to Rick Hodges, the company president and CEO. “We greatly appreciate being part of the Portsmouth community and are truly grateful to all the employees who contributed to our success over the past several decades. This is a necessary and critical economic decision that we do not take lightly, and we will be working with each of our employees to provide compensation packages and on-site outplacement services.”

The facility in Portsmouth opened in 1974 and employs around 92 people.  Rhode Island just won’t allow the company to justify keeping those jobs here.

To be sure, that’s not only a tax and regulation issue.  For Hodges Badge, energy played a big role, too:

Despite other business reforms aimed at reducing electricity costs, the plant still consumed 451,000 kilowatts of power for all of 2008 at a cost of $91,000, according to a Daily News article in July 2009. That was twice as much as the company paid to power its Missouri plant.

“I live here and I love it here, but how long can you realistically sustain that?” Rick Hodges said at that time.

Imagine how the current political landscape looks from that perspective.  The governor is touting more crony wind deals; NIMBYism is hindering an effort to increase power production in the state; and schemes to make energy more expensive through carbon taxing are a regular feature of every legislative session and may explode into law any year.

Rick Hodges was vocally against the toll on the Sakonnet River Bridge, and it can’t have been lost on him that tolls are proliferating in the state and could return at any time.  Add in the recent mandatory-sick-leave law and the push for extremely radical “equal pay” legislation.  At some point, business owners must tire of always feeling vulnerable.  Any given legislative session could be the end of their operations for some money grab or progressive identity politics impulse.

26

Another Left-Wing Threat to Rhode Island Businesses

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Don’t miss my essay on so-called “equal pay” legislation in the Providence Journal this week:

The corruption is twofold. First, many political leaders understand the danger to business, yet they may advance the legislation anyway — fearful of being tagged as “anti-woman” from petulant progressives. Worse, to remain in the good graces of the political elite, many prominent insider business groups, who pretend they represent the overall business community, are providing cover for lawmakers, making believe that their negotiated watered-down version is somehow acceptable to other employers across the state. It is not. This is exactly what happened last year with the free-paid-time-off legislation. And this repeated corruption is exactly why Rhode Island suffers one of the worst business climates in the country.

We are also fed the bogus argument that other states have passed similar laws, so Rhode Island must follow suit to remain competitive. False. To gain a competitive advantage, Rhode Island employers should have more freedom than their counterparts to hire workers on mutually agreeable terms, rather than have their hands tied with more government-imposed red-tape.

27

Selling Cars with Classism in a Dress

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If the Super Bowl commercial for Audi cars caught your attention (in a good or bad way), be sure to read Jack Baruth’s  frame-by-frame analysis of the commercial:

After watching the one-minute advertisement carefully, however, I understood feminism, or equal pay, is the last thing Audi wants you to take away from it. The message is far subtler, and more powerful, than the dull recitation of the pseudo-progressive catechism droning on in the background. This spot is visual — and as you’ll see below, you can’t understand it until you watch it and see what it’s really telling you.

Let me tell you up front: chances are you won’t like what Audi has to say.

Basically, the commercial is about wealthy whites dominating working-class whites in all ways, including their virtue signaling. So, it’s pretty much an articulation of liberalism in a sixty seconds.

29

DAILY SIGNAL: Is War Imminent? How Should Israel Respond to Iranian Attack?

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Israeli leaders say the nation will respond to Iran’s weekend attack, but what that response will entail remains unclear. “I can see a number of scenarios in which this does escalate to a regional and potentially even a global conflict,” says a former member of the National Security Council, Robert Greenway, adding,“I can see fewer […]

30

The extreme financial costs of the lie ‘All Kids, All the Time’

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Chariho is desperate for more of your money. Their stated motivation is the credo, “All kids…all the time.” This is a powerful appeal. Of course, we all want to support the kids. So, when anybody challenges their motivation, it becomes important for them, the biased government special interest apparatus, to attack and discredit the challenger. Right now, Superintendent Gina Picard and Chairman Catherine Guisti have their ire trained on me. The attacks do not bother me. However, it is important to me that you know the truth. Because the growing leviathan of Chariho is drowning people financially by pricing them out of their own homes.

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