Women, work, & the question of'comparable worth': two views
Hackett, Clifford & Rosenberg, Jan
Women, work & the question of 'comparable worth' IS IT REALLY WORTH IT? TWO VIEWS CLIFFORD HACKETT Better from a distance SHOULD WOMEN be paid for jobs on the basis of what men earn in entirely...
...Minnesota's 1982-83 laws on the subject were backed with an initial appropriation of $27 million to adjust state salaries...
...Black women, for example, have now closed the wage gap with white women...
...In addition to the issue of equity, comparable worth directly confronts the snowballing issues of need and adequacy...
...In the private sector, this linkage is vital to keep a company competitive...
...But doesn't the open market already perform its own kind of valuation when people put their skills out for examination and competition...
...Black men, however, hold many of the male-dominated blue collar jobs which comparable worth proponents cite as examples of unfairly high pay...
...second, it maintains that women's abilities, education, and experience are undervalued and they should get more money no matter what jobs they do...
...The costs of comparable worth are much higher when litigation has dragged on, job evaluation studies have to be updated, and back pay awarded...
...More specifically, comparable worth offers unions an important bargaining chip in their current efforts to organize new women workers and, perhaps more importantly, to solidify the support of their female membership...
...Correcting this discrimination will not bankrupt the country, proponents of comparable worth say, pointing to several cases where the system has been applied to government and private organizations...
...Government workers are, in turn, an increasingly large proportion of a state's total work force...
...It cannot afford comparable worth, according to union leaders (and industry spokesmen, of course...
...Second, even admitting that economic life is not always fair, who is wise enough to evaluate continuously the varying worths which society applies to jobs...
...Such studies, long used by management but now refined to eliminate biases against women, compare actual male and female wages to what they "should" be (according to the statistical regression model) if the jobs were all filled by white men...
...The complex historical, social, and political conditions in which work and workers are evaluated, and wages are set, cannot be reduced to ahistorical equations...
...The appeal of comparable worth is considerable — especially from a distance...
...No such caution animates the comparable worth advocates...
...Wages, they claim, are set according to laws of marginal productivity or by laws of supply and demand, and women, by crowding into fewer occupations that fit best with their essential family roles and responsibilities, reduce the market value of their wages...
...As the movement has developed in the United States, it promises to fulfill the individualist, bourgeois promise to judge people's work and achievements on their merits, not in terms of ascribed characteristics of the worker...
...Garment workers and their representatives have been far more concerned with enforcement of labor laws and regulations than with comparable worth...
...Fair wages for women is one goal among others, and unionists will have to weigh it against these other issues (e.g...
...If the secretary earns premium pay in order to match the plumber's wage, private sector workers who pay the taxes will object...
...If women want higher wages, they soon learn to avoid jobs with many qualified competitors, whether men or women...
...by 1984 less than 15 percent of American families fit this traditional model...
...The answer of comparable worth advocates is that these factors be judged by a committee of personnel experts who regularly analyze job content and make comparisons of skills and experience in large firms and within government...
...The churches, the universities, art, and the government often pay less than business and industry...
...Minnesota, a progressive state by most standards, recently passed laws requiring a study of job characteristics of all government jobs, state and local, and set aside money to start applying the program...
...Take the case of San Jose...
...For the women's movement itself, comparable worth seems a very depressing course to take...
...It may include not only greater skills but longer or irregular hours, and sometimes higher risks...
...billing clerks, librarians, waiters and waitresses, and health technicians all had well over 80 percent female employees...
...this is probably the looniest idea since Looney Tunes came on the screen...
...First, most women do not want to be shunted away, by gender, from certain jobs even if they choose other work...
...Perhaps most surprising of all, Business Week and the New York Times, hardly the vanguards of trade unionism or feminism, have both endorsed comparable worth in their respective editorial pages in the last few months...
...Employers would then choose workers by merit, not gender...
...But these instances provide thin gruel to nourish the cause...
...Some of us are appalled by plumbers who get $40 for a house call...
...Both workers and managers share an interest in their company's economic viability, which may seem far less urgent to a judge...
...This assault against comparable worth could make the ERA debacle look mild by comparison...
...Comparable worth is like the parable of the golden egg...
...But because of the complexities in the job market there are always too many "other" or "unknown" factors of such analyses to explain the residual differential of lower pay for women...
...Women should consider more selective and specific approaches to better pay and job integration...
...It grows out of the dying embers of the old political demand, ' 'Equal Pay for Equal Work," the success of which depends on the elusive, unlikely integration of jobs by men and women...
...The question is: Are women underpaid, or are their jobs simply worth less than men's...
...Even today, more than twenty years after the Equal Pay Act of 1963, women's average pay is only 59 percent of men's and most women continue to work in the same "pink collar ghettos" that their mothers and grandmothers worked in...
...Why should women, who like to nurse or teach school, change jobs just to earn as much as men with comparable skills, education, and experience...
...Often the demands consist of entrance hurdles, like bar exams, advanced degrees and other qualifiers...
...In Colorado, nurses sought better wages through comparable worth action but lost in court...
...It is not about the fact that football players and movie stars earn too much money, but that women make less money than men...
...But the pay which women, as well as men, receive is based not only on the credentials but also on market competition...
...Economic rewards are not the only measure of job value for women or men...
...But a careful look at female employment proves inconclusive on this point...
...Some of the particulars are instructive: in 1983 the occupations of secretary, registered nurse, and child-care worker were each more than 95 percent female...
...There have been important changes this century in women's wages which have risen faster than men's since 1900, according to a recent Rand Corporation study...
...There are two main reasons for the wide support that comparable worth has achieved...
...Most settlements, so far, particularly those reached through collective bargaining, involve very small percentage increases (less than 5 percent) to a city's or state s overall budget...
...In a major decision in 1977 (Christensen v. Iowa), the Supreme Court cited the attempt to use the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a basis for comparable worth...
...High divorce and illegitimacy rates and the enormous increase in female-headed households, record numbers of women (particularly those with pre-school children) in the labor force, and the concentration of female workers in women's jobs have converged into a complex dubbed the "feminization of poverty...
...What is wrong, then, with these plans, especially if they have public support...
...for others, welfare reform has seemed far more urgent than the workplace problems around comparable worth...
...Yet the governor's request for funds to implement the study was rejected in a budget crisis...
...For many reasons, women still do not always seek the same jobs men do...
...An unstated comparison in our minds pits these ' 'over-paid'' exemplars against those of us who perform the hum-drum jobs which keep the economy going or who (and these are mostly women) undertake the most humane, compassionate, and bedeviling jobs in all societies: nursing, child care, and primary education — all low-paying labors...
...Private employers pay the lowest possible wages needed to stay in competition...
...These jobs are paid less than men's jobs because of "The Market," say the foes of comparable worth...
...Eventually, elected officials will have to account for the pay of their secretaries and their plumbers...
...Facing great hostility in the private sector, comparable worth has moved with some success into closed markets like state and local government where worker and union pressures combine with trendy political constituencies...
...Opponents of comparable worth claim that women workers choose from a small range of traditionally earmarked "women's jobs" in spite of their low pay because they offer other compensations...
...Commonweal: 342 JAN ROSENBERG Judging on the merits AT A TIME of Republican dominance and the collapse of the Democratic party, of unparalleled union decline and demoralization, of resurgent racial antagonism, when "feminist" still connotes professional upper-middleclass women, along comes comparable worth, a movement which at its best flies in the face of those dominant trends...
...Until further studies are done, no one knows what the total cost to the state and its local governments, also covered, will be...
...These studies, as both advocates and opponents are quick to point out, typically provide evidence for collective bargaining, grievance, or law suits on behalf of aggrieved female employees, a large and increasing proportion of all government workers...
...If women can compete, this argument goes, they will...
...A great deal of opposition focuses on the dangers of government-imposed settlements, whether new laws or judicial decisions...
...Further, the private sector has so far largely ignored the comparable worth approach as a frothy concoction of no import...
...It rejected this approach saying:' 'We find nothing in the text and history of Title VII (of the Act) suggesting that Congress intended to abrogate the laws of supply and demand or other economic principles that determine wage rates for different kinds of work.'' Even in the 1981 Gunther case, cited most often by women as holding the door open for comparable worth actions, the Supreme Court said that the women prison guards' claim of lower pay because they were women "is not based on the controversial concept of 'comparable worth.' " In order to make progress and to avoid another stalemate like the ERA, comparable worth advocates will have to either change the law or convince judges that existing laws require comparable worth interpretations...
...Labor economists start by identifying known differentials on jobs and pay by sex, race, age, and occupational group...
...First, they say, this competition of women in a men's job market will be enhanced if women in lower-paying jobs get the same pay as comparable men...
...Even if most plumbers will always be men and most day-care workers women, society benefits when rigid job segregation by sex is softened...
...Society is, in fact, subtly undervaluing jobs only because women perform them...
...Labor Department journal by Janice Shack-Marquez, a federal economist, says, "Most of the studies of the pay disparity between men and women have been motivated by a desire to quantify the effects of discrimination in the labor market on women's earnings...
...A committee of personnel experts...
...In San Jose, California, a similar plan was initiated with $1.5 million for pay equity adjustments...
...Whatever happened to the premise of equal pay for women, that if women earned the same as men in a particular job category they would more surely compete for those jobs...
...easy exit and reentry, for example, mesh with women's primary family roles, allowing them to take time off for childbearing and rearing, to piece together a good fit between their work and family roles...
...The answer would seem to be yes following the federal equal-pay-for-equal- work law of 1963 which laid the ground for improved work opportunities for women...
...What is wrong with this new approach...
...Second, the predominance of women in some low-paying jobs — retail clerking, secretarial and clerical work, child care and domestic work — has patterned so many women for so long that many are now too old to be retrained...
...In addition, some critics from both left and right fear that comparable worth will sound the death knell to the goal of integrating men and women in the work force...
...Or perhaps to impose an impossibly heavy financial burden on the taxpayers...
...A recent article in a U.S...
...As long as the competition remains relatively open, workers benefit by maintaining the mobility and skills to move into better paying or more interesting jobs...
...This is particularly the case for heavily female public employee unions like the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the undisputed leaders of the nationwide movement for comparable worth...
...Most workers do not desire such a life, and those who do are thus able to demand higher wages and earlier retirements...
...To avoid this course, more measured, more confident, and more reasonable goals are needed for women...
...When they went on strike, however, they won...
...This fact of maternal life is not, in itself, unfair or a matter for the courts to handle...
...Ironically, management consultants urgently warn companies of the new dangers introduced by job evaluation studies, the fifty-yearold management technique recently taken over by dissatisfied employees...
...This is such an old truth that it may have to be completely forgotten so we can learn it again...
...Not all predominantly female unions in the private sector actively support comparable worth...
...While the only large-scale case, involving the state of Washington, is still in the courts, state taxpayers may have to pay over $1 billion if the suit prevails...
...relative worth of a super-salesman who actually spends much of his time preparing for a few million-dollar sales a month and a senior secretary whose long hours and mental strain are usually endured under someone else's direct control...
...Legislatures in thirty-three states have passed measures concerning comparable worth, while those in many others (eighteen at last count) have called for job evaluation studies to examine the extent of pay discrimination against women...
...The state is certain to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court...
...That settlement included $130 million (more than 30 percent of the total dollar settlement) targeted to raise the wages of underpaid, mostly women workers in "women's jobs...
...Many male-dominated jobs also pay less than others with lower investments of skills, education, and experience...
...The two are not always the same, but moving up usually means more demanding work...
...The sixty cents a woman earns today, on average, to a man's dollar, will rise to seventy-four cents by the end of the next decade...
...There will be no revolution in the workplace no matter what the strategy...
...But only after AFSCME's 1983 Washington state victory, in which the union won a federal district court judgment (now being appealed) against the state for discriminating against its female employees in terms of their jobs and wages, did the union and the issue of comparable worth gain national attention...
...In 1950, 70 percent of American households were headed by men whose income was the sole income for their family...
...Even if we reach the most perfect system of job access and pay for women, there may still be important differences in both the jobs they hold and what they earn...
...Second, comparable worth promises to expand individual equity, to fulfill the bourgeois promise to reward people's work and achievements on their merits, not in terms of ascribed characteristics of the worker...
...Shack-Marquez says' 'not enough is known" about individual earnings "to be confident that all the labor market variables in which men and women differ have been isolated...
...The Democratic party first endorsed the idea at its National Convention in 1972, and has continued to endorse it ever since...
...tion, cultural attitudes about women, the family, and the value of women's work in which discrimination is embedded...
...To eliminate the discriminatory, ascriptive, sexist attitudes and assumptions which still determine and justify wages, they urge that employers adopt job evaluation studies to explicate the value (or "worth") of each job to an employer in terms of its level of skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions...
...Is this pay disparity fair...
...Union leaders, of course, must be (somewhat) responsive to the support this policy has among their diverse members...
...Finally, given the overlapping and contradictory interests of union members, and the overall orientation of American unions, comparable worth is not likely to become ideologically abstracted from the workplace...
...The fear of "new class" experts is especially ironic...
...Comparable worth is the latest collective effort to raise the wages of working women in the labor force...
...In conclusion, if comparable worth seems such a mistaken solution for misconceived problems, here are several principles with which to insure that maximum benefits accrue to women in their search for true pay and job equity: • Not every difference between men and women in the job market comes from malevolent causes...
...Why should employers pay librarians as much as electricians when the supply of the former will produce ample numbers at little more than the minimum white collar wage, while electricians are almost always scarce and, therefore, expensive...
...Feminist leaders, organizations, and journals (including but not limited to NOW, the League of Women Voters, Women's Action Alliance, and MS) all support comparable worth but, with the exception of social scientists, they are clearly not at the center of the political mobilization around this issue...
...congressional representatives Mary Rose Oakar, Patsy Schroeder, Geraldine Ferraro, to Senators Dan Evans, Alan Cranston, and Bill Bradley— have jumped on the bandwagon by holding hearings, commissioning studies, and sponsoring legislation...
...Firefighters are paid for risking their lives in a pattern which alternates boredom with real danger...
...It is not possible, over the longer term, to have pockets of comparable worth in an otherwise competitive economy without problems...
...others are repelled by lawyers who earn $200 an hour...
...Anticipation of motherhood, its arrival, and its consequences will always affect women in the job market...
...Second, men and women complement each other in social values, temperaments, and sensitivities...
...Failure to pay, not the principles of comparable worth, are at issue here...
...note that the authors, mostly women, represent a "broad spectrum" of views on the issue...
...If its advocates insist on using political pressures to pay women in government more than wages in the private sector, cities and states will eventually react to increased costs by contracting much of "women's work" to the private sector...
...Comparable worth entails assigning numbers to every important aspect of every paying job...
...This is true in San Jose, Minnesota, and now in Los Angeles...
...While this concept masks some key internal distinctions and contradictions among women who are poor at a given moment, the fact remains that families headed by women continue to grow by leaps and bounds and are far more likely to be impoverished than those headed by men or by male-female couples...
...Yet, this inconclusive method of reductional analysis is at present the only "proof" of discrimination against women...
...The pay difference, she says, is much smaller when narrowly-defined white collar jobs are compared for men and women than in broader studies...
...It's not hard to see why private employers cannot take seriously the idea of actually setting pay by comparable-worth rules...
...Instead of helping move women into new jobs as the equal-pay law did, comparable worth seems to give up that fight...
...Comparable worth draws support far beyond the union movement...
...The values that women share may always be different from those of men...
...In the words of Reagan-appointee Clarence Pendleton...
...In government, paying secretaries without regard to their cost in the local job market destroys confidence in governCommonweal: 340 ment's ability to match the efficiency of business...
...BEHIND ALL the arguments and the tactics of the comparable worth debate is the strong conviction that discrimination against women is a major factor in the labor market...
...Let's be clear about what comparable worth is and isn't...
...In addition, 23 House Republicans just issued a report recommending the early adoption of comparable worth policies as well as stepped-up federal investigation of discrimination against women in the workplace...
...Choosing motherhood may not be fully compatible with other career choices...
...But the closer one looks at comparable worth, the more Clifford hackett served in the Foreign Service and on the staffs of congressional committees involved with foreign affairs...
...The AFL-CIO has officially endorsed comparable worth since 1979, while the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) and several of its more heavily female affiliates (AFSCME, SEIU, IUE, and CWA) have actually led the fight...
...Even if the Washington state decision is sustained and the state government gets a huge bill for back wages, the case's impact on comparable worth remains unclear...
...This differential also exists within jobs and professions, and persists even as women are moving into new job fields and upward in career tracks...
...It pleads for higher pay for women on two quite different, but equally dubious, bases: first, it argues that jobs women actually perform are undervalued and should be upgraded by law...
...They conclude that the work women do is paid less simply because it is done by women, not because of intrinsic characteristics or value of the job to the employer...
...Yes, but unfairness results because women's work or women themselves are undervalued...
...Comparable worth advocates conclude society must reevaluate the work women do choose...
...But motherhood should not bar the maximum participation a woman wants in the job marketplace...
...As Eleanor Holmes Norton, then chair of the U.S...
...This criticism should be taken seriously...
...There is another broad appeal to justice related to the issue: the seeming inability of the free market economy to provide reasonable pay scales crossing vocational lines...
...Who assigns the numbers and weighs job skills against education, experience versus risks, and so on...
...Their free market analysis denies such irrational but historical factors as outright discrimination (by workers, by employers, or both), and the existence, extent, and efficacy of unionization...
...It would have to apply to men's jobs as well...
...Involved in comparable worth since 1974 when they supported an employee-initiated job evaluation study in the state of Washington, AFSCME gained wider attention during its 1981 strike in San Jose, California...
...New laws and studies roll in so fast that it is difficult to keep up with the latest score...
...The city must now pay electricians more than the study said they were "worth," while librarians are being paid above-market salaries...
...The proponents of comparable worth emphasize both overt and institutional occupational and wage discrimination against women, as well as the deeper structures of sex role socializaJAN ROSENBERG teaches sociology at Long Island University and has written on issues concerning women, work, and family structures...
...Countless government officials at all levels—from Commonweal: 338 Carol Bellamy and Andrew Stein in New York City to U.S...
...Who will weigh the...
...Many of these women and children would be helped considerably by the implementation of comparable worth...
...Comparable worth may have some benefits as an ideal if it leads toward better job integration...
...The Washington state legislature's study of state jobs, which used the Willis scale, concluded that women's work was underpaid...
...One unspoken premise of the comparable worth fight is resentment against the male domination of the political, social, and economic life of our society...
...A bill mandating comparable worth pay scales just sailed through the House of Representatives by a vote of 413 to 6, indicating surprisingly wide Republican as well as Democratic support...
...The critics offer a concerted opposition, repeatedly emphasizing the efficacy of the "free market" (my quotes), the dangers of imperious "new class" experts and judges dictating wage levels in accord with their anti-market, Utopian assumptions, and the credentialist, meritocratic justifications on which the movement rests...
...To back the principle that women must be paid more because they are women implies a pessimism about the chances of full integration of women in the job market...
...The lesson is not that comparable worth is too expensive, but that comparable worth won through the courts is too expensive...
...While in the past female work patterns and wages more closely reflected social norms and family-work relationships, today many women and their families suffer severely from the continuation of these patterns...
...TWO VIEWS CLIFFORD HACKETT Better from a distance SHOULD WOMEN be paid for jobs on the basis of what men earn in entirely different jobs...
...Over a dozen states have passed laws which refer to comparable worth, pay equity, or similar goals in their civil service systems, but most of these laws are too new or too vague to have established comparable worth up to now...
...Neither the mood of the present Supreme Court, nor the explicit scorn of the Reagan administration is promising in this regard...
...Comparable worth is not concerned with the kinds of jobs women do, only how much they earn...
...The long-term problem is that comparable worth destroys the link between work and its marketplace evaluation...
...otherwise, they want to doctor the system so that the work they do gets more pay through government or judicial fiat...
...Trade union leadership avoids the problems of bureaucratic regulation in w' h judges and lawyers arbitrarily define pay levels...
...Clearly, comparable woruvdefenders say, these discrepancies are unfair, perhaps illegal, and should be ended by law...
...Finally, comparable worth is not about job opportunity, job mobility, or job advancement, but about whether the open marketplace for jobs, with its flaws, should be abolished...
...Comparable worth proponents are sometimes accused of "credentialism" for seeking more pay for those women, like nurses and librarians, who also face educational hurdles for qualifications...
...The study concluded that both librarians and electricians were worth $3000 a month...
...First, fear of its inevitability (a plausible fear continually reasserted by its advocates) has pressed government agencies and some large corporations to consider initiating comparable worth studies and policies, thus avoiding polarization and increased costs resulting from protracted legal suits...
...Comparable worth advocates answer this argument in several ways, none fully cogent...
...ILGWU represents garment workers (including many women) in an industry that is intensely competitive, requires low capital investment, and operates on a very low margin of profit...
...Empirically, however, female government workers (the main group likely to be strongly affected by comparable worth) include a high proportion of black women...
...Numerous contemporary women (from those living alone to those heading their own families or co-heading families with husbands) are increasingly reluctant to accept wages they have come to see as inadequate and unfair, whatever the historical-cultural patterns in which they were once embedded...
...Clearly not...
...The threat of litigation is likely to be more helpful than the litigation itself...
...Even if large numbers of employers were persuaded to apply comparable worth, the concept could not be limited to women alone...
...We are once again asked to stretch our values, to incorporate a new group, women workers, and to reward them in terms of the work they do in the labor market, not in terms of their femaleness...
...Nationally, 40 percent of AFSCME members are women while 60 percent of all government workers are women...
...In addition to the wide support given comparable worth, a number of leading business journals and organizations (including Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and the 31 May 1985: 339 Commonweal: 340 U.S...
...In fact the cost is closely related to the strategy used in pursuing comparable worth...
...U .s stand the best chance to head off the dangers of polai ation (between men and women workers, and between industrial and white-collar workers) that many skeptics fear...
...First, it ignores the (Continued on page 340) Commonweal: 336 Better from a distance (cont...
...The question of race, though built into the model and recognized on some level by the advocates and evaluators, does not figure explicitly in the abstract discussions of comparable worth...
...But this revaluing without regard to the job market is at the heart of the comparable worth dispute, the cause of dismay among almost everyone except those who think women would gain from a radical remaking of the economy...
...Editors of a recent book Comparable Worth and Wage Discrimination (Temple University Press, $39.95, 311 pp...
...The undisputed facts, then, are that most women and men continue to work at different jobs, and that women's jobs are paid less than men's and frequently offer fewer opportunities for advancement...
...Continued from page 336) source of the problem: the labor pool has an over-supply of women who are available for too limited a number of entrylevel jobs...
...A genuine problem, worth some of the attention given to comparable worth, is how mothers of all ages can gain and hold such participation without sacrificing, jeopardizing, or postponing motherhood...
...They weigh factors like intermittent and part-time work, interruptions for pregnancies, and other causes for lower pay for women...
...Yet the idea, called comparable worth, is finding it difficult to emerge, as some had predicted it would, as the "issue of the 80s" for women...
...The federal judge who heard the case decided that the state acted in bad faith by commissioning a study whose findings of pay discrimination were then not implemented...
...Johnny Carson and NFL football players prompt many to say,' 'No one can be worth that much...
...Activity in the states is even more dramatic...
...If state or court actions move toward serious implementation of the concept, a fierce reaction to the perceived threat against the free market will come...
...Yet many women know this before motherhood or shortly after...
...Their fears of interventionist, activist judges imposing costly and impractical judgments is more firmly grounded in recent experience...
...Women are no longer temporary and peripheral 31 May 1985: 337 participants ("intermittent," in economic parlance) in the labor force...
...And that, advocates say, is discrimination...
...However, the appropriate response to this male dominance is a realistic demand for fairness to women in the job market, not a casually conceived and marginally tenable idea like comparable worth...
...In the local, competitive economy, however, librarians could be hired for much less while electricians in the area were paid more...
...safety, job protection, and so forth) in each concrete instance...
...This relation may help and almost certainly does not hinder any workplace, even if not all jobs are interchangeable...
...Federal- courts have, in several other cases, specifically 31 May 1985: 341 excluded comparable worth from decisions about pay differences between men and women...
...Who will decide, for instance, the worth of four years studying elementary education at a first-class university compared to four years studying engineering at a community college...
...But pay, for these lesser-paid workers, is fortunately not the only consideration in their jobs...
...Many of the pro-business opponents have conveniently forgotten the long history of wage-setting by expert job evaluations in the U.S., and write of them as though they are a new trick designed by greedy, pushy women and their representatives...
...Job actions — whether in a single job, in one business or industry at a time, or nationwide — will probably command more attention and get more results in the long term than the murky concepts of comparable worth...
...This may well be because most feminist activists are not in predominantly female jobs in the' 'pink collar ghetto...
...Third, pay equity advocates say, these jobs are undervalued simply because women hold them...
...doubtful its real value appears...
...With victories like that, comparable worth will eventually fall of its own weight...
...Some incredible mechanism of government would then insure that everyone with the same numbers would get the same pay...
...Internal education in key unions has aimed at increasing support among members, just as lobbying and some public education has aimed at drumming up support among politicians and the public...
...These social scientists are prominent among the "usual suspects" rounded up repeatedly for hearings in Washington D.C...
...It conducted a jobs study as the result of a strike over comparable worth...
...Yet such experts as Norman D. Willis, head of a personnel advisory firm which the state of Washington employed in one of the most famous comparable-worth cases, says he recoils at the possibility that his classifications, or anyone else's, should become law...
...But can we afford it...
...In 1980 about 80 percent of all women were still concentrated in "women's jobs" (typically defined as 70 percent or more of the work force...
...as well as state capitals and cities around the country...
...Labor market discrimination, she notes, may be only one answer, of undetermined importance, in assessing women's lower pay...
...Isn't comparable worth, no matter how just, an impossibly expensive objective, likely to bankrupt the already unproductive, inefficient public sector toward which it's primarily directed...
...Feminist economists and sociologists, however, have contributed heavily to the mountain of data, analyses, and policy proposals pouring forth from the comparable worth movement...
...Chamber of Commerce) as well as conservative intellectuals and politicos (from sociologist Brigitte Berger and economist June O'Neill to the indefatigable Phyllis Schlafly), staunchly oppose the movement, convinced that it is neither good nor inevitable...
...There are three basic strategies: on the government side, legislation and litigation, and on the non-government side, collective bargaining...
...Would not church workers and writers, to take just two obvious examples of underpaid professions, have claims on higher pay based on the comparable worth of their education, skills, and contributions to society...
...Women's values, and the jobs they embody, are important for society and for the women who perform them, even when the pay is not high...
...The fear of radical, Utopian changes pitting "pink-collar" women against blue-collar men, wrought in the name of comparable worth, is overdone...
...at its best this fear creates a climate in which intransigent firms and governments are more likely to reach an agreement with their workers...
...But the competing interests of blacks, Hispanics, and others who want to change the job market according to their legitimate grievances will prevent a clear field for women...
...Equal Employment Opportunity Commission predicted in the late 1970s, it has snowballed into one of the biggest issues of the decade...
...It seems to address a basic economic injustice: men earn more than women whether the measure is annual income, average hourly wages, starting salaries, or concentration in top-paying jobs...
...Yet they agree that salary disparities between male- and female-dominated jobs "are based in large part on discrimination...
Vol. 112 • May 1985 • No. 11
