Average woman worker loses nearly half a million to pay discrimination

ALSO posted in Labor by Omaha Steve - who I appreciate immensely for posting such stuff so often!
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http://www.workdayminnesota.org/index.php?news_6_3892

29 December 2008

GADSDEN, Ala. - Lilly Ledbetter, the longtime Goodyear tire supervisor whose pay discrimination case against her firm went all the way to the Supreme Court, lost $223,776 in lifetime earnings due to 19 years of discrimination at the tire firm's Gadsden, Ala., plant, a new report says.
As it turns out, Ledbetter, who lost her case before the Supreme Court, was somewhere between average and lucky. Her earnings loss was half the national average of lifetime earnings losses, $434,000 per woman, that female workers suffer compared to male counterparts in the same jobs.

But Ledbetter's Goodyear career covered only half of the gentle gray-haired grandmother's working life. Take those 19 years and double them, and Lilly Ledbetter is a typical female worker in the U.S., the report says.

At least in Alabama, she wasn't in the state where woman worker are worst off. Nor, as a company supervisor, was Ledbetter the worst off among all female workers, analysis of federal data shows.

In Lifetime Losses: The Career Wage Gap, Jessica Arons of the Center for American Progress, a liberal and pro-worker think tank, showed lifetime earnings of average female workers trailed those of their male counterparts by hundreds of thousands of dollars. In one profession, the law, the gap is $1.48 million.

And the pay gap understates the lifetime earnings chasm, Arons noted. Quoting Ledbetter, Arons pointed out the lifetime gap not only affects a woman's pay but her pension levels and her Social Security earnings base. All are lower.

FULL story at link.

and how about passing that ERA now? It's disgusting. I used to work with a company that paid women $25 and hour for the exact same job that paid men $45 per hour. I fought like mad for equal pay and was given 35 and hour and finally $40 and hour-but no more. The guy I shared an office with did the same job as I, was less experienced than I, took three times as long as I did to do the work, and his work always needed corrections...yet he was paid $10 an hour more than I was. It was maddening.

This "scientist" leaves OUT the fact that women don't have time or energy to work 60-hours/week when they ALSO have to do all the child-rearing and housework (typically) because many men don't help out with that nor do they think they should have to.

It's a matter of economics too. When a couple has kids, WHO usually gives up the career to stay at home? Well - depends on who makes the least money. Usually, that's the woman. (who also, via no fault of her own, has to take time off to be pregnant and HAVE the child and to recover from that, too).

So, KEEPING women in lower-paid brackets - even for the SAME work when she is equivalently or more qualified - thereby ENSURES that they have no CHOICE but to "do things other than make money" - it's rather foisted on them by mere economics - change the economics - and you change the CHOICE.

Funny how he leaves THAT self-perpetuating fact out. Pfft!

http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200812/women-have-better-things-do-make-money-iii

:eyes:

He went on to say that men needed to be paid more because "they need stuff" and women don't. I asked him why my father needed money when he ran off with another woman while my mother did not when she was left alone with two kids to raise on her own? At first he didn't have an answer for that, then he said "well, she could have remarried". I told him that she never got another offer, and that women outnumber men, so there's not a man for every woman. He changed the subject. Fuck, I HATE the constant struggle with these selfish knuckle dragging PIGS!!

demanded a pay raise and got it

:thumbsup: :patriot:

175 for the "women's pay gap" in ~ a week.

Just in case we were ever wondering where our priorities lie...