flink@umcp-cs.UUCP (05/21/84)
Ariel Shattan says about the "pink collar ghettos" secretaries...nurses...teaching children... NONE of these positions pay as much as a welder, or even as a GARBAGE COLLECTOR! It's a crying shame that this society doesn't consider children as important as garbage. I think the last sentence is unfair. How much a job pays is not a good indication of the value society places on that job as a whole. It is at best an indication of the ECONOMIC value that society attributes to the MARGINAL PRODUCT of such labor (marginal product = value of gaining or losing one more unit, in this case one more work-hour). Now, personally, I'd like to see teachers paid more so that higher quality teachers would be attracted. Still, they should not be paid according to the reasoning, which I think is implicit in the above, whereby one asks "where would we be without them?" If people are willing to take low salaries because they want to perform some service to humanity (e.g. nursing, social work), or just because that is what they were brought up to be, it would be foolish for us (read: the govt.) to step in and enforce higher salaries. And here's my beef with this "comparable worth" concept feminists are pushing: it ignores the SUPPLY of labor. I have no doubt that sex discrimination in salaries exists and that it accounts for a significant part of the "59 cents" gap. But the method used by feminist groups to evaluate "comparable worth" pays attention only to the laborer's point of view -- how much education does she have, how unpleasant or risky is her job, etc. No attention is given to market forces such as the supply of labor in the discipline and the demand for the service or good produced. And no wonder. "Market" is a dirty word to the Left. I detect a hint of the "labor theory of value" in the feminist approach to evaluating pay scales. The flaw in the theory is that it ignores social needs. P.S. On auto insurance premiums: right on, Mark Brader! The aspiring iconoclast, --Paul Torek, umcp-cs!flink