Barack Obama does.
John McCain only supports equal pay for women ‘in concept’, according to former Lieutenant Governor and McCain surrogate Margaret Farrow. The comments were made during a televised appearance, in which she conceded that McCain had voted against measures to advance equal pay for women, but still supported the ‘concept’ of equal pay.
‘Women aren’t making 70 cents on the dollar ‘in concept’ – that’s a reality,’ said Democratic Party of Wisconsin Vice Chair Lena Taylor.
‘When John McCain’s response to equal pay is that women need more ‘education and training,’ and his chief economic advisor’s response to the economy is that we’re in a ‘mental recession’ and we’re a ‘nation of whiners,’ it shows that McCain is out of touch and just doesn’t get it. American families, and women in particular, are facing real challenges that require real solutions, and John McCain isn’t offering any,’ Taylor said.
What you are really saying is that Obama supports yet another government bureaucracy to determine how much each person in America should be paid. How wonderful.
I’d rather be judged individually than by race, sex, or any other discriminatory factor.
Who wouldn’t?
Almost, JWG.
“What you are really saying is that Obama supports yet another government bureaucracy to ensure that women and men earn roughly the same for the same work. How wonderful.”
I agree. That is a wonderful idea.
Why stop at the government dictating pay based on gender?
‘Women aren’t making 70 cents on the dollar ‘in concept’ – that’s a reality,’ said Democratic Party of Wisconsin Vice Chair Lena Taylor.
Now who’s pushing a lie to advance their candidate, Oliver? Why that would be you and the Democratic Party of Wisconsin Vice Chair Lena Taylor.
Educate yourself.
I see what you’re getting at. I don’t see this reform as a further tipping of a slippery slope. I see it as one among many – the Hepburn Act, the anti-trust acts of the early twentieth century, the civil rights act – that further democratize the blessings of participating in market capitalism.
If one subset of a population (whose only common link is gender) is at an unfair disadvantage, the federal government has a long history of eventually rectifying the issue. Sometimes, not always, perhaps not even often but sometimes, regulation is good.
It’s hard enough to get a bill through the American Congress – I don’t see any really heinous pay dictation coming through as a result of pushing the level of regulation a reasonable step further.
That’s pretty interesting if it’s all true, Dave. If it is, the agency assigned to deal with gender income gaps will have pretty empty desks. Nobody’s saying that a male brain surgeon and a female preschool teacher should make the same. Equal pay for equal work – that’s as far as it goes (at least, as far as I know!).
If it is, the agency assigned to deal with gender income gaps will have pretty empty desks.
Do we really need a government bureaucracy to get us that last 2% to 100% parity?
And is 100% even possible? Taking into account some of the points raised in that story (i.e. men are more likely to take dangerous but higher paying jobs, women are more likely to want more flexibility in their schedule and more time off for family things than men, etc.), can we ever have 100% equity between men and women?
I disagree. Like the accountability paperwork that is currently overwhelming schools and teachers, there would be all sorts of paperwork required for every business to prove that men and women are being equally paid based on the multitude of factors that would be established. The government would joyfully employ many people to sort the info and put little checkmarks on specially made forms to track the newest government mandates.
can we ever have 100% equity between men and women?
Equal pay for equal work – yes, yes, I believe we can. If one gender for whatever reason prefers a lower paying set of jobs, well that’s – of course – not an issue. But there are plenty of people smarter than myself saying there is a larger problem at work here, even if the 70 cent figure is inaccurate (which I’m not yet convinced it is). Just as I’d have felt then it was worth giving the ICC the necessary teeth to deal with the railroad barons fleecing the farmers, I feel it’s probably worth establishing something to deal with this. But, if your piece is correct and there isn’t a equal-work issue, that’s a whole different ball of wax.
there would be all sorts of paperwork required for every business to prove that men and women are being equally paid based on the multitude of factors that would be established.
I dunno, seems to me like it’d just be an extra sheet of paper at tax time. The F’s of a certain tenure and experience level in your company are on the same pay scale as the M’s of similar experience and tenure. What’s the mystery? Are there other relevant mitigating factors to compensation other than experience prior to joining the company, job duties and time with the company?
Contrary to popular belief, repeating something doesn’t actually make it true.
I am a beautiful butterfly ‘in concept’. Doesn’t mean a damn thing.
Another interesting tidbit …
Barack Obama has not called you out for lying in that last comment.
But I will! You are a liar AND a pig (bonus!)
Discrimination as the reason for pay disparity between men and women has never passed the plausibility test for me. If men and women do equal work, yet women are paid far less, why would you (if you were an employer) hire men? Just hire a bunch of women, pay them these low wages, then kill your competitors from your much lower labor costs.
In order to buy into this theory, you are essentially saying that there must be widespread discrimination specifically against women, and this discrimination exists despite going against the financial interests of the discriminators. How likely does that seem? Even if I were to grant that there might be widespread wage discrimination against women, (which seems unlikely in this day and age, but for the sake of argument) it strains credulity to also think that employers would willingly lose money in order to do it. If theres anything I trust about employers, its that they’ll do anything to save a buck.
As such, the bar is very high for what proves this kind of discrimination – the reasons in Dave’s quote seem much more likely.
John McCain laughed when a supporter called Hilary Clinton a bitch.
That needs to be on spin cycle.
Oddly enough, in Obama’s Senate office, the average woman is paid $6,000 less than the average man. And of his five staffers who pull down over $100,000 a year, four of them are men.
In John McCain’s office, the women average about $2,500 more than the men.
Obama has 33 men on his staff, 31 women. McCain has 30 women, 16 men.
Perhaps we should pass Obama’s bill, if only to help the women who have the misfortune to work for him.
Nah, that’d never work. Congress routinely exempts itself from the laws it passes.
But it sounds like Obama is saying that he needs a law to force him to do the right thing.
J.
Oliver,
I support equal pay for women, but as pointed out above, the 70 cents issue is misleading and a myth. Two issues to consider are:
a) if companies could pay a woman less and get the same work for a 20 – 30 cent discount, why aren’t companies doing just that (they certainly outsource offshore!)
b) equal pay has been the law since 1960. With all the hungry lawyers out there, if there was such a broad 20-30 cent pay gap for discrimination, we’d hear a lot more lawsuits than we do.
There are a lot of reasons for pay gaps….
What is not a myth are the various statements regarding the decision where a woman who was discriminated against was told she was too late. I believe McCain supported that decision and that was wrong. I believe Obama took the opposite(, correct) position. But that’s my recollection at the moment.
Jay Tea, can you provide a link to those claims?
Is there someone who doesn’t agree with the concept of equal pay for equal work?
If so, please explain.
Jerry, just Google up “McCain Obama female staff.” The link I found that seemed to be the original source was this:
http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=32005
Note that they cite official congressional figures for their story.
It’s the latest in a long string of Obama saying that we ought to do things that he doesn’t — but Republicans do. “Who will save the orphan in Bangladesh?” Why, John and Cindy McCain. “We need to teach our children to speak Spanish” — like George W. Bush does. We need to be more environmentally conscious and have greener homes — like Bush has in Crawford. Obama says Americans should be more charitable — but has never given more than 6.1% of his income to charity, while McCain has gone as high as 28.6%.
Maybe people like Obama need the government to tell them to do the right things. But I neither want nor need it.
Something I’ve always wondered about, and maybe if I did some research I could find it out, is: do these gender-salary studies control for outliers like, say, professional athletes? If it doesn’t (and if it compares all men and women who are working then it wouldn’t) how much of an effect does an industry which is almost exclusivly male, and making minimum salaries upwards of $300,000 and an upper-bound in the 10s of millions affect the data. I doubt it does much because there are simply so many people, but it would still be something which would contribute to the gender gap.
Continuing on the “professional athlete” labor theme, since male sports are so much more popular, and thus pay more, than female sports, is the Obama administration going to require a salary cap on the NBA at the level of the WNBA, or will it require the WNBA to have a salary minimum equal to the NBA?
So no troll denies the Bitch thing about McCain. Thought so.
Oh, and nice strawman for the salary thing – You can’t just take the average of the salaries straight. You need to match positions, experience, tenure, so on. Jay is suggesting we do salary comparisons exactly the way he thinks is wrong.
Discrimination as the reason for pay disparity between men and women has never passed the plausibility test for me. If men and women do equal work, yet women are paid far less, why would you (if you were an employer) hire men?
I would imagine it was because women make up a smaller portion of the labor force. Also if you (in both a collective and you personally) were to hell bent on profit margins, you would hire illegal immigrants anyhow.
Maybe people like Obama need the government to tell them to do the right things. But I neither want nor need it.
Can’t let the government tell you not to beat up those durn fags, now can you?
b) equal pay has been the law since 1960. With all the hungry lawyers out there, if there was such a broad 20-30 cent pay gap for discrimination, we’d hear a lot more lawsuits than we do.
Do you know how much your colleagues/co-workers are paid? They don’t know this is happening because they don’t have a measuring stick to compare it to, and they don’t ask because it’s rude.
Oddly enough, in Obama’s Senate office, the average woman is paid $6,000 less than the average man.
Dear God, are you a fucking moron? Wait, don’t answer that. There’s several definitions of “average” (mean, median, mode), and without job descriptions, we don’t know if they’re receiving fair payment or not.
In John McCain’s office, the women average about $2,500 more than the men.
Well, that’s pretty easy when you hire illegal immigrants to run your campaign.
Obama has 33 men on his staff, 31 women. McCain has 30 women, 16 men.
Conclusion: McCain doesn’t like to have a whole lot of men getting in the way of his harem.
like George W. Bush does.
No he doesn’t.
1. We’ve never heard him speak Spanish.
2. He doesn’t even speak English.
while McCain has gone as high as 28.6%.
Hate to bring this up, but the IRA “widows and orphans fund” isn’t a charity.
Jay (Tea), why do you hate America so much?
What you are really saying is that Obama supports yet another government bureaucracy to determine how much each person in America should be paid.
Uh, no.
Just entirely wrong, that’s all. No one, not Obama, not anyone else in this campaign has said they support that.
You made it up.
Mr. Obama supports the Ledbetter bill. Put down your seltzer bottles and look it up.
Tell you what, Mobius, Zython, Quaker — let’s pass that bill and THEN see what the courts have to say about Obama’s personnel policies.
Oh, that’s right, Congress will most likely exempt itself from that law, like they do so many other times, so any potentially disgruntled Obama employees will have even less of a chance to get justice than Paula Jones did.
J.
Well then — I’ll be waiting for Quaker to provide the quote from McCain saying he doesn’t support equal pay for women.
Oh, what’s that you say? McCain’s actions in not supporting a specific bill mean he doesn’t support equal pay? Well, then Obama’s actions in support of a specific bill mean he supports all the bureaucracy that goes with it.
Because if a company must pay men and women a certain salary based on a government mandated formula, then that’s exactly what Obama supports.
There’s the real straw man.
There are several questions with answers that separate the opposing views:
1) How will the government define “equal work”?
2) Why do you look to the government to define “appropriate” pay scales for private sector employees?
3) Do you expect women’s pay, once the government determines it is not “equal,” to go up, or do you think men’s pay will go down? (Think Title IX)
4) How will a government mandated salary structure affect the economic productivity of companies that will spend additional time determining the equality of certain job descriptions and proving they are providing equal pay or defending unequal pay?
Oh, I forgot:
If the salary gap has been decreasing without government intervention into salary scales, why do you think it is necessary for the government to intervene now? Do you need the government to take another dictatorial role in our society before the opportunity disappears?
Straw, more straw.
The proposed law in question (Ledbetter) would change the statue of limitations regarding an EXISTING law. Not adding any new govt. regulations, new definitions of “equal work”, and anything.
It’s about ensuring there are effective means to enforce existing laws.
The full ERA constitutional amendment we can discuss separately. You know they are different.
And still no comment about McCain and ‘Bitch’
Oh, what’s that you say? McCain’s actions in not supporting a specific bill mean he doesn’t support equal pay? Well, then Obama’s actions in support of a specific bill mean he supports all the bureaucracy that goes with it.
Because if a company must pay men and women a certain salary based on a government mandated formula, then that’s exactly what Obama supports.
You’re right, it’s McCain’s opposition to the bill.
You’re wrong, the bill does not call for any bureaucracy to govern wages.
Is it too much to expect you people to know even the most elementary facts under discussion? Apparently it is.
so any potentially disgruntled Obama employees will have even less of a chance to get justice than Paula Jones did.
Don’t you ever get tired of hollering, “But Clinton!!” If any of Mr. Obama’s employees need to take action against him, maybe they can rely on a whole raft of new right wing friends to foot their legal bills.
Under Bush, seniors have to go to Canada or Mexico to buy rx drugs. Under McCain, women will have to go to Canada or Mexico to get an abortion
Because if a company must pay men and women a certain salary based on a government mandated formula,
Got any more like that in your tiny little clown car? No government mandated formula. That’s all in your head.
Too lazy to look it up? Fine. Read:
No formula. No bureaucracy.
You may now resume your pie fight.
John McCain laughed when a supporter called Hilary Clinton a bitch.
Yeah, and Obama told a female reporter “Hold on one second, sweetie“.
See, Obama didn’t just laugh at someone else’s sexist comment, he made it himself.
That didn’t turn out quite the way you expected, did it?
No, he pretty much expected some con cobag to try to create a moral equivalence.
Dave,
Do you really think there’s an equivalence between calling someone a “bitch” and calling someone a “sweetie”?
John McCain laughed when a supporter called Hilary Clinton a bitch.
Dave in SoCal: Yeah, and Obama told a female reporter “Hold on one second, sweetie“.
Can you really never come up with an other way to respond? Someone points out something your side did that was wrong, and you can respond by
a) being an adult and acknowledging it was a bad move (”Yeah, I wish he hadn’t done that.”)
b) being a zealot and denying/defending it (”Hey, there’s nothing wrong with that!”)
c) being a child and pointing out something the other side did (”Yeah? Well, you’re as bad as I am!”)
Why is it always “c”?
(Which, you’ll note, is also an acknowledgment that your guy did do something wrong.)
To answer your question, yes, he did just equate “bitch” and “sweetie”.
Just in case you were wondering why McCain defenders lack credibility on gender issues