Blast from the past
I got a kick from hearing about recent coverage of Roberts memos that include "comparable worth."
Comparable worth was this idea that you could set up some rubric, for a court or an agency, to determine, say, that teachers, mostly women, should be paid a different amount than they earned relative to say, truckdrivers. It's so hilariously idiotic that it simply couldn't ever gain traction, not that the press and the Dems didn't try.
Comparable worth is quite easy to understand. Let's compare something real simple, so there's absolutely no doubt that the job is indeed the same: excavating 1000 cubic yards of dirt. Let's say we have a teacher do it, and let's say we have Rush Limbaugh do it. If one does the job in a Columbus suburb on a housing site, it's worth, I'm guessing, $2000. If you do that on the White House lawn, it's worth, five to 10 in Leavenworth (if not a few final bullets). You can choose which one you want to do which. That's comparable worth.
posted by ColumbusGuy @ 5:38 AM
2 Comments:
The idea was that women were devalued in the workplace, and society shunted them into jobs that paid less than they should considering the work involved. In other words, a case of systematic discrimination, no different from paying women less for doing the same job as a man. There might be problems in putting this into practice, but that doesn't necessarily mean the theory is flawed.
Nice statement of comparable worth, and it is indeed true that problems in practice do not invalidate theory (although they do invalidate putting the theory into practice, mooting the point, unless another practice can be found).
However, comparable worth is fatally flawed, from the ground up. It was a howler from the get-go. If women could be systematically hired for lower wages to do the same job as a man, the problem wouldn't be that there were too few women employed, it would be that there would be too few men employed. Nothing cures racism and sexism faster than having to pay for it.
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