The gender wage gap controversy reminds me of an old joke...

[rrneck]

Last edited Mon Feb 10, 2014, 09:50 PM - Edit history (1)

If this is the wrong place to post this, feel free to lock it.


Bob and Ray are digging a hole. It's hot, miserable work. Ray says, "Howzit the boss is up there sitting under a tree drinking beer and we're down here digging this fucking hole?" Bob says, "Beats me, why don't you go ask him?" "Believe I will."

Ray climbs out of the hole and asks the boss about his unfair advantage. The boss just grins, sets down his beer and says, "Here, I'll show you." He holds his hand against the tree and tells Ray to hit it as hard as he can. When Ray swings, the boss pulls his hand away and Ray punches the Oak tree, breaking four knuckles. The boss says, "Do you understand now?" "Yep", says Ray, nursing his damaged hand. "Then get down there and get back to work."

When Ray returns to the hole, Bob asks him what he found out. Ray says, "He explained it real good. Here, I'll show you." With that, Ray holds his hand in front of his face and says, "Hit my hand".

-------------------

So Joe and Mary both work for Fuck You Inc sucking stink for twelve hours a day. Joe makes four dollars an hour and Mary pulls down three fifty. How does it make sense for Mary to demand to be paid as much as Joe for sucking stink? That's not equality, justice, or progress. It's an endorsement for paying stink suckers a shitty wage.

Robber baron Jay Gould once quipped, "You can always pay one half of the poor to kill the other half."

[malthaussen]

1. To be sure, the right place to post this.

There is a problem with your thesis. Pay equality is not generally about "sucking stink." Pay equality is about equal compensation for work requiring some degree of professional competence, training, and certification.

There is another problem with your thesis. Put it this way: a popular anti-socialist meme runs that "socialism is just a means of spreading misery equally to all." Let us grant, per arguendo, that this is so. Then it must follow that capitalism is a means of spreading misery unequally to all.

-- Ml

[rrneck]

2. Hey, stink sucking takes a lot of training. I keed, I keed...

I agree that a fair wage for all should be the objective. But when that objective is forced through the culture war meat grinder, we get opinions like this. That subthread is not about pay equality, but about gender equality. That confusion is not unusual nor is it confined to an internet message board.

There are a lot of problems with the influence of money in politics. One of them is the conversion of advocacy into a consumer product. Fairness for all frequently, it seems, becomes fairness for me. And who profits most from consumer goods designed to exacerbate affectation and self indulgence?

And if you don't get paid enough to do it, it's all stink sucking.

[malthaussen]

3. Then except for a handful at the top...

... it's all stink suckage, nyet? So the possibility of truly fair compensation for one's labor is unrealistic, hence focusing on a smaller goal -- such as, bluntly, making sure "I get mine" is not unimaginable. Dunno about you, but I don't know anyone who wouldn't say they work their butts off. Which leads me to wonder why, if this is so, there are so many assholes around.

But there's a flip side, too. The ones making the greater pay for the suckage are equally interesting in keeping down the compensation for the others, to "get theirs," because in the final analysis, "pay equality" is gonna mean spreading the same amount of dollars around a larger number of people, or lowering the wages of one group to raise the wages of another. Because there is no way the moneybags are gonna raise the overall compensation for the work the peons do. So we have those with the larger half of the ten percent of the total cookie with a vested interest to keep down those who have a smaller piece. This is one reason, I find, that explains why so many "vote against their best interests" and elect Republicans, who while they are not interested in elevating anyone out of poverty, can play to the fear that the voter is going to lose some part of the little he has. The irony is, of course, that then they take it away anyway.

-- Mal

[rrneck]

4. Capitulation is not a solution.

If the issue is about equitable pay for a given occupation, the term "women" should not occur. That's because it's not about women, but workers of all genders, ethnicities and sexual orientations.

If the problem is that a large percentage of workers, and your implication is that they are male, are primarialy interested in struggling for resources that are artificially constrained by the wealthy, do you think it is wise to treat them as adversaries? Don't you think it would be better to figure out a way to make everyone more money than arguing about whether or not they like you?

When Bob climbs back down into the hole, would you bandage his hand, or punch his lights out?

[malthaussen]

5. But my question is, who is treating whom as an adversary?

(And obviously we are veering into really broad-brush and stereotypical stuff, so indulge.

It would make sense to band together, of course. But which came first, the chicken or the egg? Is the woman demanding some of "his" the instigator, or the male who steadfastly refuses to support "her" demands?

One of the reasons, I've found, that feminists mention the forbidden "w" world in equality disputes is that it sometimes turns out that those who claim to want "equality for all" really want to increase their own piece while not caring if the relative distribution remains unequal. And this often applies to other oppressed groups as well, they are not really included or considered in the struggle against the Man. Hence they must shout a bit louder to attain that inclusion.

Which of course just makes the divide et impera crowd smile more.

-- Mal

[rrneck]

7. It doesn't matter who started the fight.

It only matters who profits from it.

It's pretty easy to see that the CEO of Fuck You Inc profits. The big winners in the Fuck Them industry are a lot more elusive. How many men make money as MRA pundits? How many women are professional feminists writing books and blogs, attending seminars, and founding chairs in women's studies departments? Gender conflict is a big industry, and all the significant players are in it to "get theirs". How much do you think Naomi Wolf is worth? Whose side do you think she's on now?

Of course Wolf isn't a billionaire. She's little more than a sub contractor for the really big players. The ideology industry still demands the production of something, even if it's just pontificating about microagression. The big money is feeding off the transfer of that ideology and the battle over what gets transmitted. There's nothing like people fighting over the use of your service. Now that's a business model. Don't actually produce anything, just feed off those who do.

Everybody that sells ideology want's "what's theirs". And they depend on expanding market share to get it. So if you can make a pretty good get by living fighting for the right of women to control their own bodies, you can make an even better living expanding the "feminist perspective" to claim every nook and cranny of modern culture. Especially if you can do it by writing books and blogs instead of eating tear gas. Even if it really has nothing to do with it.

[lumberjack_jeff]

6. Time out.

Just like the game of life, early on you're asked to make a choice: career "a" or career "b". It's not up to some elevated authority to decide what to pay people.

If the supply of people willing to suck stink is too small to meet the demand for stink suckers the wage goes up. If the supply of people who disliked the idea of sucking stink so much that they bought the training and certification required to get the other job is too high then the wage for perfume sucking goes down.

There's nothing that says that a plumber is "worth less" than a teacher. The people with plugged toilets decide how much (s)he's worth.

Different jobs requiring similar training and certification can carry radically different nonmonetary benefit. In fact, credential creep in desirable careers is driven mostly by a need in the small pool of employers to weed out the applicants. Education, as practiced in the US is actually more like a bidding war. The one willing to invest the most money in the english literature PhD will get the $28,000 a year copy editor job.

[rrneck]

8. And

if the female dominated perfume sniffers union strikes in solidarity with the male dominated stink suckers union, everybody benefits.

[rrneck]

9. And by the way

people without training and certification deserve a fair wage too.

[Major Nikon]

10. Pay equality is about comparing apples to apples

When the BLS data figure of 23% is quoted, people are talking about the raw weekly earnings for full time (>35 hours per week) employees by gender. This data set equates the following:

Person A who works 35 hours = Person B working 60 hours
Person A who works 0 hours of overtime = Person B who works 10 hours of overtime
Person A who has 0 years on the job experience = Person B who has 20 years on the job experience
Person A who works in industry Y = Person B who works in industry Z
Person A who is non-union employee = Person B who is union represented employee

On and on it goes.

In other words, the BLS data set is only concerned with two things:

1) Do you work > 35 hours in a week?
2) Were you born with a penis?

So long as #1 is met, #2 determines which column the data falls into.

This is not apples to apples and is of quite limited value in any objective discussion of gender pay equity.