Via Echidne, John McCain kills irony:
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who skipped a Senate vote seeking equal pay for women last night in order to campaign for president, said he opposed the measure because it would prompt a flood of lawsuits…The presumptive GOP nominee is visiting poor communities throughout the nation, including towns in Alabama and Appalachia; today he toured New Orleans’ Ninth Ward.
Do you suppose that ensuring female heads of households earned the same amount as their male counterparts might improve the economy of poor communities?
“I am all in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation, as is typical of what’s being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems,” McCain told reporters yesterday. “This is government playing a much, much greater role in the business of a private enterprise system.”
As Echidne notes,
How would McCain achieve pay equity for women without any lawsuits? Perhaps if women ask very prettily?
SR 4-1239214t4325: RESOLVED, That women will be paid the same as men in equivalent positions, and also that this has always been the case, and that claims of former wage inequality are null and void, and maybe now this will shut women up even though they never had anything to complain about in the first place because they were always having babies and not applying themselves to their careers. Damn kids with their miniskirts.
16 Responses to “Because Lord knows, wage inequality has NOTHING to do with it”
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Pay equity: theory, not practice.
Vote McCain 2008… and marry a booze heiress.
I so cannot wait to see this guy go down in flames come November.
In between now and then, I’m going to have to learn how to read this shit without banging my head against my desk. At the rate I’m going, I’m either going to have get a desk made of granite and buy a new desk every month.
I once had a conservative candidate for the Illinois General Assembly tell me during an endorsement interview, with a straight face, that she didn’t support laws against gender discrimination because they would just lead to employers refusing to hire young women.
“Why would they do that?” I asked her.
“So they won’t get stuck when the girls get pregnant and quit,” she replied.
But now McCain has shown us the perfect way out of this dilemma: Just take away their ability to seek legal redress! Then they won’t be discriminated against. Of course, if they are anyway, they still won’t be able to sue, but they’re girls, so who cares?
But teh market is always right! If women get less wages it is because the free and open market determined they need less money! Capitalism FTW!
The logic is flawless: Laws only lead to lawsuits, therefore if we don’t want lawsuits then what we have to do is get rid of the laws.
I can only hope that McCain’s newfound stance against laws will be applied evenly.
All I can say to this is “Good.” Because honestly, private enterprise does a shitty job of doing anything but concentrating wealth at the top.
Shorter John McCain: “Wage inequity doesn’t hurt me at all, so it’s less of a problem than tedious lawsuits, which I might have to pay attention to, or nondiscrimination laws, which would cut into the profits of the companies that give me campaign contributions, and which as president, I might be required to get off my ass and enforce.”
Given that this bill is based on an interpretation of the existing law that left most legal scholars with their jaws on the floor, it’s kind of hard to argue that it’s some weird new concept that no one has ever heard of before that they were supposed to be doing anyway.
Unless, of course, you’re a completely dishonest person like John McCain.
I posted this on my personal blog last night and made the mistake of not friends locking it.
The second comment that I got was a dipshit saying that the real problem was that women didn’t negotiate higher salaries to begin with.
*sigh*
the depth of denial is mind boggling.
>>Do you suppose that ensuring female heads of households earned the same amount as their male counterparts might improve the economy of poor communities?
No. Because a company has x dollars to spend on wages and benefits. If the federal government comes along and mandates that women should be paid more than they’re worth, then the company will reduce the male employees’ wages accordingly, to return to the equilibrium of x dollars. You’d just be shifting the pay around, not creating any new pay.
It’s pretty nice of McCain to make it perfectly clear that he is part of the multi-millionaire/corporations first group. He, and everyone he knows, are the ones doing the discrimination and would face the lawsuits.
Their victims…random people and women (no, women aren’t people) who shouldn’t be bothering their betters anyway. As his pal W says, get 2 or 3 jobs!
And assetmgmt, the company could always reduce the outrageous CEO salaries to equalize pay along gender/racial/etc. lines. CEO’s didn’t always make 25 times or more of their employee’s salary.
Who planned this juxtaposition–we don’t need equal pay, we need to revisit the war on poverty, which failed largely due to female wage earners in poor towns being unable to support their families on ‘women’s wages’?
Will this person or team be in charge of handling any issue more important than the selection of napkins at the White House? If so, McCain is hereby disqualified. Bad optics, man.
Wanna try that again?
Actually, they tend to have more, because we have an economic system called “capitalism,” in which companies try to make something called “profit,” which is excess money that it retains after meeting its operating expenses, and could be used to, for example, pay its employees fairly.
The federal government is not seeking to mandate that women be paid more than they’re worth. It is seeking to mandate that women be paid what they’re worth.
With the result that everyone doing the same work will receive the same pay. Which is, if you’ll notice, the general goal here. Assuming, of course, that this is where they’ll get the excess money from, rather than out of the profits that have been added to with the rest of what they should’ve been paying their female employees.
Yes. Duh. That’s the idea. What did you think poverty was, if not an unbalanced distribution of material resources? Poverty isn’t caused by a lack of sufficient money to go around; it’s caused by sufficient money not going around.
Considering that a significant percentage of low-income households are headed by women, legislating fair wages for them would, in fact, improve their economic station.
http://clintonista.wordpress.com/2008/04/26/as-for-the-symbolism-war-quod-erat-demonstrandum/
I see the problem in my city.
Some jobs that pay really well hourly - carpentry and framing, steel workers, iron workers, etc. - are entirely or almost entirely male. I never see women iron workers or carpenters. And, to be honest, you have to blame Labor and the trade unions, because those jobs could be allocated equally to women, along with the high rate of pay and benefits. We need to pressure the Unions to do their part.
Someday, maybe the little boy me and my partner just had a few months ago will be able to say “one of my mommies is an ironworker.” How cool is that?
Kyra:
The asshole you rebut has even less credibility than you give credit for. If companies had even vaguely something like a fixed budget for wages and salaries, then you’d see increases in unemployment every time the minimum wage went up. Instead, the numbers seem to be divided between “no visible effect” and increased employment.
Considering what it costs to hire and train a new employee, it’s pretty clear that the result of laws forbidding wage discrimination (which have only been in place for 50 years or so, this is hardly a new idea) is to increase the wages of the group being discriminated against while having a negligible impact on the wages of those not discriminated against, because cutting wages makes people leave or work to rule, and either one costs a company far more than sucking it up and just obeying the law.
(And yeah, the reasoning in Ledbetter was pretty mindboggling; at many companies disclosure of individual salaries is a firing offense, but somehow if you don’t find out the salaries of all of your male and female colleagues within the first year of employment and file a complaint immediately, you’re forever barred from asking for a fair deal in the future.)