fsks@unc.UUCP (Frank Silbermann) (07/07/85)
In a previous posting criticizing Comparable Worth, I wrote: >One cause of women's lower income is that women tend to choose >occupations with greater nonmonetary benefits, which may compensate >for the lower pay scales. That is, women more often choose occupations >which center around helping other people and cooperating with them >(teacher, nurse, secretary, social worker). The direct gratitude >from the helpee satisfies some of the woman's social needs etc. Many replies described in detail the unpleasantness involved in these "women's jobs." Nevertheless, many women would prefer to empty bedpans for dying patients rather than take a job where they might have to fire somebody occasionally. Many would prefer to teach social studies to unruly (and perhaps even violent) adolescents than to take a job that required extra exposure to mathematics. Whether you consider a job fun or intolerable depends on your own values and tastes. Since people's tastes vary so much, it would be impossible for any single person or small group to issue satifaction ratings to various jobs. Yet, to apply the doctrine of "comparable worth", this is exactly the kind of rating that must be made. Who is qualified to make such a decision? The only fair way is to let the people decide in the marketplace. That is, a job is worth only as much money as it takes to attract enough qualified applicants. By this approach, we can conclude that math teachers are underpaid, computer programmers are paid appropriately, and postal workers are overpaid. The chief criticism of allowing the market to decide, is that the market has been tampered with. Because women were restricted to only a few occupations for so many years, these occupations have received many more applicants at lower wages than market forces alone would justify. For fairness, we would have to remove unfair and arbitrary discrimination agains women (and certain minority groups). If that can be done, then the market will eventually correct itself. "Comparable Worth" is a kludgy attempt to patch over this problem. Like a bad computer program bug fix, it only corrects part of problem, while introducing new errors. Suppose the government were able to issue a fiat that would suddenly increase secretaries' wages. What would happen? For one, businesses would put extra effort into finding ways to get along with fewer secretaries. Second, more people would try to get into this field. The result: unemployment of secretaries. Women who were forced into this field in the days when they had few alternatives would find themselves without ANY job at all. Clearly, "Comparable Worth" is not the answer. The answer is AA. But let's be clear about the purpose and extent of this affirmative action. We must not use affirmative action as an attempt to undo past injustice. What's done is done and cannot be undone. Nor should we use affirmative action with the intent of pro-rata representation of all social groups. This would be an impossible task, since there are an infinite number of overlapping groups and subgroups to ever achieve fairness. We must satisfy ourselves with the more modest goal of partially offsetting the employers' existing prejudices, so that people can get used to the idea of women in "men's jobs", blacks in "white jobs", etc. Frank Silbermann