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In reply to the discussion: Is Rachel Maddow sincere? [View all]hfojvt
(37,573 posts)Even if it is only 2 hours out of every forty.
When state budgets were being crunched, I suggested that the state could save by cutting state workers pay by 5% and giving them longer weekends. Let them go home an hour early on Friday and come in an hour later on Monday. It's not an awesome solution, but it's better than having the state lay of 5% of its workforce.
As far as upper class concerns. It does seem to me that it is the higher paying jobs where discrimination is more likely to take place. At the entry level, a person is hired for the same low pay, regardless of gender. One quote from the sex discrimination lawsuit against Wal-mart struck me as funny that way. "Women store managers, he found, made an average of
$89,280 a year, $16,400 less than men."
Well, puh-leaze. That was from 2001. $89,280 a year is a sh*tload of money as far as I am concerned. I'd love to have a job making $45,000 a year even today 11 years later. $89,280 puts her in the 85th percentile even if she is single. If she has a spouse making 70% of her pay, she's in the TOP 5%. Well, down here in the bottom 20% we really do not care to fight very hard to make sure that people in the top 5% get more money. If I am fighting for anything, it is to reduce the salaries of the men by $16,400.
Even Lilly Ledbetter was making decent money. Not spectactular, but decent. Probably lots of men in 1998 would LOVE to have a job that paid $44,724. That's over 138% of what I make today 14 years later. By the inflation calculator $44,724 in 1998 is the same as 62,940 today! That puts her in the top 50% even if she doesn't have a well-paid spouse (and it always seems to me that people with good paying jobs marry other people with good paying jobs.)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lilly-ledbetter/equal-pay-women_b_1434626.html
Yet she writes "how much my family had done without" when it seems likely that her family made more than 80% of the rest of American households. In 1998, only 18.2% of households made over $100,000 and she's almost halfway there with her salary alone. In 1998, 34.8% of households made less than $35,000. Should one of their top concerns be "making sure Lilly Ledbetter gets more money"?