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Why the New Deal Needed LBJ

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Shorter Michael Lind: The idea that women should make the same money as men for performing work of similar skill is nuttier than anything proposed by Stalin or Mao. And worse than that, the idea of women working and sending their children to “baby kennels” is contrary to nature. So, as a New Deal liberal, I hope we can convince the public that the gender relations that existed in the 30s were optimal.

Nathan Newman has more.

…UPDATE: Rob defends Lind in comments, but unfortunately his argument is premised on the Lind/Roberts strawman, i.e. that comparable worth means that government will set wages across the board. This is, of course, not the case. The technical data about skill levels compiled by pay equity groups was used 1)as leverage in labor negotiations, and 2)to determine whether civil rights laws have been violated. (Compliance with civil rights laws in practice does not require perfect equity, and only the most egregious violators will be sued by the government. And if Rob thinks that segregating a class of people into professions that pay much lower wages than other occupations of similar skill doesn’t constitute discrimination, I’d love to hear the argument.) Suits like the Wal-Mart suit that Nathan discusses would not result in the government setting wages for every Wal-Mart store. As Michael McCann points out in his superb study of pay equity litigation, Rights At Work:

It is important to emphasize that job evaluation techniques and statistical evaluations are almost never translated into remedial wage scales. Rather, employers and workers typically use them to structure ongoing bargaining over wage rates for specific job categories. Even where legislation or litigation mandate general guidelines for achieving equity, a process of discretionary work/management negotiation is almost always established to implement wage reform. (31; my emphasis.)

I’ll have more to say about Lind’s complaints about “plaintiff’s attorneys” later. But, of course, it is true that alleviating systematic wage discrimination is a difficult problem, both in the assessment and the application. But what supporters of wage equity understand that Lind does not is that this discrimination is simply not the result of the magic invisible hand of a perfectly functioning free market, but is the result of decisions made by corporate managers, many of whom share Lind’s convictions about the desirability of women having full-time careers. It would be nice to overcome these things without any legal action, but it’s obviously not realistic.

At any rate, for people like Roberts and Lind, the technical issues are just window dressing; it’s clear that they don’t regard wage equity as a desirable end in itself. And let’s be clear about the consequences of Lind’s preferred outcome, which is entirely dependent on parents being in stable, heterosexual marriages. Where wage segregation exists, single mothers are at a massive disadvantage. And, of course, making women economically dependent on their husbands increases domestic abuse as women are economically compelled to stay in bad marriages. Once you go beyond the strawman that Lind erects from a single, off-the-cuff quote, the odiousness of his argument is clear. (And as for Lind’s argument that pay equity is bad because it will decrease male wages, it is the precise moral equivalent of New Deal labor leaders who wanted to keep unions segregated because integrated unions might depress white wages.)

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