Opinion: Fair pay acts will hamper recovery

Submitted by anthony on Wed, 2009-01-21 03:30

Article here. Excerpt:

'Two new ''equal pay'' laws will likely land on President-elect Barak Obama's desk as soon as he is inaugurated

Tuesday. These laws were taken up by the new Congress as its first order of business, along with emergency measures to rescue the economy.
...
Due to the undeniable progress made towards equity over the past 40 years and the marked diversity of today's workplace, I would argue that rank discrimination is today the least likely of many factors in any woman's compensation.

However, in the burdens they impose -- and the urgency with which their advocates are trying to get them enacted -- both of these new laws seem to assume that discrimination is the most likely.

Existing anti-discrimination laws, with their stiff penalties, already provide strong prohibitions against pay differentials based on race, religion or gender.

Employers who have invested heavily for decades in leveling the playing field for women should not be penalized now -- in the midst of a full-blown economic crisis -- with a flood of costly litigation. Our economy needs rescue measures that see the workplace as it is, not as it was 40 years ago.'

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Self-employed women earn 49% of what self-employed men earn. This is the only reliable measure of the true value of the economic output of the average woman relative to the average man.

So when can men expect to receive their long-overdue 100% raises?

After all, this is all about fairness, right?

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Submitted by RandomMan on Thu, 2009-01-22 06:19