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• Anonymous

  I would be interested to know if there was a rider attached to the paycheck fairness act. Collins tends to vote on party lines but Snowe is usually real good on women’s issues

• Anonymous

  I think probably this bill has more to do with political posturing than anything else. I imagine the Snowe and Collins understand the devastating impact this legislation would have. This bill makes suing an employer extremely easy and makes the employer pay the bill with no responsibility on the part of the person doing the suing. Not only that, under this bill the “wronged employee” could set the employers methodology for determining salary. If that wasn’t enough if an employee that was the manager of a chain store (as example) would have to be paid the same in a low-wage area as the employee in a high wage area. The court system would be clogged with imagined discrimination cases.
  There are just too many economic consequences to this un thought-out piece of radical legislation.
  This legislation was held up as nonviable when Democrats had vast majorities in the House and the Senate as well as a Democratic President. If it can’t pass muster with its strongest advocates in power there is absolutely no chance of it even coming up in committee now.

• Anonymous

  No legislation yet has closed the gender wage gap — not the 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, not Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, not the 1991 amendments to Title VII, not affirmative action, not diversity, not the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, not the countless state and local laws and regulations, not the horde of overseers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission….. Nor would the Paycheck Fairness Act have worked.

  That’s because pay-equity advocates, at no small financial cost to taxpayers and the economy, continue to overlook the effects of this female AND male behavior:

  Despite the 40-year-old demand for women’s equal pay, millions of wives still choose to have no pay at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of “The Secrets of Happily Married Women,” stay-at-home wives, including the childless who represent an estimated 10 percent, constitute a growing niche. “In the past few years,” he says in a CNN August 2008 report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier….” at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka. If more women are staying at home, perhaps it’s because feminists and the media have told women for years that female workers are paid less than men in the same jobs — so why bother working if they’re going to be penalized and humiliated for being a woman.)

  As full-time mothers or homemakers, stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living in luxury? Because they’re supported by their husband.

  Both feminists and the media miss — or ignore — what this obviously implies: If millions of wives are able to accept no wages and live as well as their husbands, millions of other wives are able to accept low wages, refuse overtime and promotions, take more unpaid days off, avoid uncomfortable wage-bargaining (http://tinyurl.com/45ecy7p) — all of which lower women’s average pay. They can do this because they are supported by a husband who must earn more than if he’d chosen never to marry. (Still, even many men who shun marriage, unlike women, feel their self worth is tied to their net worth.) This is how MEN help create the wage gap. If the roles were reversed so that men raised the children and women raised the income, men would average lower pay than women.

  See “A Response to the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act” at http://tinyurl.com/pvbrcu

  By the way, the next Equal Occupational Fatality Day is in 2020. The year 2020 is how far into the future women will have to work to experience the same number of work-related deaths that men experienced in 2009 alone.
  See http://blog.american.com/?p=30031