Now that the midterm elections are over and a lame duck session of Congress has convened, the Democrats in charge can take a deep breath, put aside all the campaign rhetoric and get back to doing what they do best: destroying jobs.
Sitting on Harry Reid’s desk is a little-noticed economic hand grenade with its pin half-pulled called the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill that has already passed the House and might well pass the Senate if Reid can put down a Republican filibuster. Dirty Harry has to be feeling lucky these days, having won reelection by a comfortable margin, and he’s proven before that when it comes to ultra-liberal legislation he’s willing to shoot first and worry about colleagues caught in the crossfire later.
The Paycheck Fairness Act seeks to finally end pay differences between men and women. It’s one of those well-intentioned pieces of righteousness that sounds like it was cooked up in an Ivy League womyn’s studies workshop circa 1988. For years, such business-illiterate ideas have led only to harmless campus marches where students can pretend they’re standing up to Nixon and Vietnam. But today seminar thinking has a way of making it all the way into the real economy.
Women earn 77 cents on the dollar compared to men. So what?
Men and women, you may have noticed, don’t do the same work. After 40 years of aggressive cultural sensitivity training about how women can (and should!) be miners, movers, truckers, soldiers, construction workers, firemen — oops, “fighters” — and maybe even sperm donors, women continue to prefer the office. They still gravitate towards jobs that involve lower stakes, shorter workweeks and a preference for personal relationships over ruthless competition. By 2005, according to American Medical Association stats, 73% of pediatrics residents were women and 64% of dermatology residents were women — but 69% of residents learning surgery were men. Should it surprise us that zit analysis pays less than cardiothoracic surgery?
When you factor in experience, education, overtime (which men are more likely to accept) and some other factors, the real pay gap is more like five cents on the dollar, according to a 2003 study by Baruch College economist June O’Neill. As Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Manhattan Institute points out, if so many women are getting treated unfairly, why were only 942 complaints about paycheck sex bias filed with the EEOC in 2009? And why were more than 95% of those complaints ruled baseless?
Yet the bill would require even very small businesses to submit a sheaf of detailed employment data to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regulators — even if no complaint has been filed. That burden would destroy lots of small firms that create actual goods and services and instead invent phony oversight jobs for the DC leech-ocracy.
“Paycheck discrimination hurts families who lose out on badly needed income,” the Professor in Chief said in July, as if the bill would simply cause more income to rain down from our employers. Wouldn’t businesses who were required to equalize pay simply take it from Sam and give it to Susie?
The PFA would require employers to disclose salary information so that Susie would have a right to know what Sam is making. Nothing can go wrong there, right? If you think your office is irritating now, imagine a place where everybody knew everybody else’s numbers. Once you and your cubicle neighbor were swapping jokes about the office coffee. Now whoever makes less is bound to hate the other. And if you make the same amount? Maybe you’ll both hate each other because you’re both convinced you’re worth more. Lawyers working on commission would be authorized to pursue feminist class-action shakedown lawsuits that would include all women in the firm unless they expressly opt out.
Office culture would be worse than the law of the jungle — it would be like high school.
A dynamic economy is a hive of inequality. A collapse in the housing market means unemployment rises drastically for men in the construction industry — and in finance. Job stability, too, is a valuable consideration in selecting a job. Teachers, nurses and government workers didn’t suffer huge layoffs. Could men’s penchant for riskier, more stressful and (consequently) higher paying jobs be the reason our wives outlive us by a decade? Hey, Professor — I’ll support the Paycheck Fairness Act if you give me a Lifetime Expectancy Fairness Act.