In the ongoing effort to distract Americans from the tepid economy in this election year, the Senate Democratic majority last week took up a new shiny object — the so-called Paycheck Fairness Act. The bill was designed to help Democratic campaigns keep alive their narrative about an alleged “Republican War on Women.” But as a real piece of legislation, the bill would have done little to improve the lot of working women, and Americans should be glad it was blocked by a Republican filibuster.
The Paycheck Fairness Act was billed as a measure to close a perceived gap in pay between the sexes. But had it passed, the bill would have mainly helped the trial lawyers who fund Democrats’ campaigns. It would have lifted the $300,000 cap on punitive damages (in addition to back pay) for businesses found to have discriminated, making for much larger potential attorneys’ fees. More importantly, it would have forced potential plaintiffs in such cases to opt out of, rather than opt into, class action lawsuits against employers over pay. This would have meant less work and larger payoffs for lawyers who troll for dissatisfied employees.
Finally, it would have forced companies to justify their pay scales in court based on “business necessity.” As Washington Examiner columnist Diana Furchtgott-Roth put it when the same bill was proposed in 2010, this means that “[m]ale supermarket managers with college degrees couldn’t be paid more than female cashiers if the college degree for the manager wasn’t consistent with ‘business necessity.’ ” This is especially absurd given the inordinate emphasis that the federal government itself places on advanced degrees in determining its own employees’ salaries. For example, the State Department is currently looking for diplomatic couriers and notes on its website that although only an associate degree is required, applicants with master’s degrees can receive higher pay for the same job. Would this disparate treatment, or countless similar examples in the civil service, qualify as a “business necessity”?
Federal law already contains remedies for working women who suffer from actual pay discrimination. What’s more, the problem is not nearly as bad as some would have you believe. A report prepared for the Department of Labor and published in 2009 showed that when the data are adjusted for hours, experience and part-time versus full-time work, women make roughly 95 percent of what men make in comparable jobs — not the misleading 77 percent figure that has been cited by President Obama and other liberals.
Unfortunately, one of the places where the wage gap is largest is in the offices of the same liberal senators who pushed for this bill. The Washington Free Beacon studied the office budgets of 50 Democratic senators and found that 37 of them pay the women on their staffs substantially less than the men. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a dogged feminist, was among the greatest offenders — on average, the Free Beacon found that her female employees made $21,000 less per year than her male staffers, “a difference of 35.2 percent.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., pays women 41 percent less than men.
Surely, both of these senators would offer some justification for the wage gaps in their own offices. It’s almost a shame their bill did not pass, because now they may never be forced to offer that justification in court.
