More and more proof is coming in every week that Comparable Worth means a wage freeze for blue-collar workers while all raises are given to mostly women’s office jobs.
One piece of proof was conveniently provided by Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley. He signed an agreement with AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) which has been nationally acclaimed as a Comparable Worth settlement.
As reported in a wage chart in the Los Angeles Times, $12 million worth of pay increases will be given to mostly female office categories, especially Clerk-Stenographer, Clerk-Typist, and Clerk. The mostly men’s blue-collar jobs will be frozen indefinitely at their current pay, especially Gardener Caretaker, Warehouse Worker, Garage Attendant, Maintenance Laborer, and Delivery Driver.
AFSCME represented its female members at the expense of its male members. The men were made to feel guilty because mostly men’s jobs pay more than mostly women’s jobs and 50 were persuaded to accept this lopsided agreement.
Both houses of Congress are now holding hearings on legislation to order a “study” of Federal pay scales. The Comparable Worth advocates plan to bias the results against the blue-collar workers by integrating the Federal white-collar and blue-collar pay scales.
Any such combining and comparing of white-collar and blue-collar employees will tremendously devalue blue-collar workers because the Federal white-collar pay system accords less than 5% of the possible points to “physical demands” and “working environment” combined.
Comparable Worth advocates have been bragging that Minnesota has passed Comparable Worth legislation and everything is going well. That really isn’t so. When Comparable Worth was implemented at the city level, police and firefighters woke up to how they will be hurt and they are lobbying and litigating hard to “include us out.”
The Comparable Worth point system gave a librarian’s job the same number of points as a fireman’s job. One fireman testified sarcastically, “I guess a librarian’s job is very dangerous; a book could fall on her head.”
In recent court appearances, the leading attorney litigating for Comparable Worth, Winn Newman, is trying to avoid use of the label “Comparable Worth” and claim he just wants “pay equity.” However, everyone interested in this subject should be on guard that the two expressions are one and the same to those who use them.
You can always identify a proposal as “Comparable Worth” if (1) it compares mostly men’s jobs with mostly women’s jobs, and (2) it is based on the so-called “worth” or “value” of a job as set by an evaluator (instead of by the marketplace).
One of the problems in discussing Comparable Worth is the blatant feminist bias of most of the network television segments that have been devoted to this subject. So, it was with particular interest that I discovered a confidential and copyrighted memorandum on Comparable Worth distributed by the legal department of the National Association of Broadcasters for the benefit of its TV and radio station members.
This memorandum tells stations to “think very carefully before undertaking any formal study of the relationship between the ‘values’ or ‘difficulty’ of the positions held by their employees and the salaries they receive.” Be sure to consult your lawyer, the memorandum warns.
“If an employer’s only motive is to protect itself against the hazards of new theories of wage discrimination like Comparable Worth,” the memorandum says sternly, “it is fair to say that a job evaluation study is far more likely to be a burden than a boon.”
In other words, don’t have a study of wages because, no matter how biased or faulty it might turn out to be, the study enables some group of employees to go into court and accuse you of “sex discrimination,” and enables a judge to slap a costly judgment on you for not implementing the study to which you never agreed.
That’s good advice, not only for television and radio broadcasters, but for every employer, including Federal and state governments and private industry.
The agenda of the Comparable Worth advocates is, first, to foist it on public employees and then on private industry. Minnesota Governor Rudy Perpich confirmed their ultimate goal when he warned that Comparable Worth should be legislated for private industry “only if they don’t do it on their own.”
