Wednesday’s defeat of the Paycheck Fairness Act in the Senate highlights the flawed priorities of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and President Obama. Rather than trying to fix the tax hike that will hit Americans on Jan. 1, Reid wanted to give the government unprecedented power over employers’ compensation decisions and cause endless litigation, discouraging hiring.
If signed into law, the bill would have required all employers with more than two employees to submit data on sex, race, national origin, and earnings of employees to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, even if no complaint has been filed.
Women would have been included in class-action suits against employers unless they specifically opted out, a windfall for trial lawyers.
The bill would have allowed employers to defend differences in pay between men and women only on grounds of education, training, and experience if factors were justified on the grounds of “business necessity.” Employers, try explaining “business necessity” to bureaucrats.
The complaint of feminist organizations is that women earn only 77 cents on a man’s dollar.
But this omits differences in jobs, weekly hours of work, and time in the workforce. When these factors are included, the difference is about five cents on the dollar.
The Paycheck Fairness Act was defeated, but Obama and the feminists are not giving up.
In a meeting with feminist leaders at the White House on Wednesday, the president said, “I don’t want you guys to lose heart at this point because we’re just going to keep on moving until we get it done.”
One way Obama can “keep on moving” is through his National Equal Pay Enforcement Task Force, established in February, which brings together the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the departments of Labor and Justice, and the Office of Personnel Management.
Even though the Paycheck Fairness Act won’t yet become law, the task force plans to implement selected provisions through regulations. It’s planning to “institute a strategy to collect pay data from federal contractors” to identify contractors out of compliance, even if no workers have complained.
The task force will study the possibility “of developing guidance for employers on evaluating pay disparities in the workplace.” Sounds harmless, but when employers don’t follow the guidelines, they may lose federal contracts.
The EEOC will develop “enhanced training for its investigators on how to investigate wage discrimination charges,” and the Department of Labor will hire another 200 workers — but not enough to make up for lost private-sector jobs — to investigate firms.
Most employers are innocent of discrimination. Of the 942 pay-discrimination complaints filed with the EEOC in 2009, only 4.6 percent were found to have “reasonable cause,” meriting full-blown investigation.
Feminist groups such as the National Women’s Law Center are lobbying the Senate to ratify the U.N.’s Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the subject of hearings before a Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee on Thursday.
Article 11 1(d) of the treaty calls for “the right to equal remuneration, including benefits, and to equal treatment in respect of work of equal value. …”
American women are entitled to equal pay for equal work now, but defining work of equal value, known as comparable worth, would keep U.N. and American bureaucrats busy for years.
Oil drillers’ work may be of equal value to that of day care workers, but companies have to pay people more to work on oil rigs because the work is dangerous and dirty and workers have to be offshore for long periods of time.
Whether through law, regulation, or international treaty, implementing measures that favor women over men destroy the foundation of the economy and its ability to provide jobs and the American dream.
Hudson Institute.
