18 cents: Why Our Wombs are a Political Battlefield [View all]

[McCamy Taylor]

"Men do not leave their jobs to have children and are less likely than women to leave their jobs to care for their children. In addition, men are less likely to move if their spouses are forced to relocate for professional purposes. All of these are reasons why turnover rates for men are lower than turnover rates for women. One study using Department of Labor reports estimates that the median number of years men stay on their jobs exceeds that for women by 77-100 percent."
Cato Institute paper, 1984
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa038.html

In the 1960s, before birth control became safe and legal, women made 59 cents for every dollar men made. Employers justified this wage discrimination by citing the unreliability of female workers. Women got pregnant. Women had children. Women with kids missed work. Women could not devote themselves to their companies the way that men could, therefore they did not deserve promotions. Women’s “delicate condition” rendered them unfit to do high paid factory and construction work, though no one seemed to mind when they worked long, grueling hours in the pink collar ghetto, scrubbing floors, canning fish or sewing in sweat shops.

Women in the workplace were shamed for doing what they had to do to support their families. A woman who could not hold onto a man with a high paying job was deemed a failure. With her self-esteem battered and bruised, the female worker did not dare raise her voice to demand a better wage or better work conditions. She was just there “temporarily”, said her boss. The minute she got a man, she would quit. The minute she spread her legs and conceived a child, she would demand maternity leave. Or get a back alley abortion and die and leave her employer in the lurch. She was a liability. The boss only kept her on out of a sense of charity. She didn’t deserve more than 59 cents on the dollar---

Then came safe, legal birth control. Then came the right to (safely) terminate an unwanted pregnancy. And suddenly women could say, with confidence, “I can do the same job a man can do.” As a result, the wage discrepancy between women and men has been declining in the last few decades. The change has been slow. Women have gained a half cent a year, so that by 2010 we were making 77 cents compared to the dollar men made for comparable work.

http://www.pay-equity.org/info-time.html

Doesn’t sound like much, I know, but when you are living on the edge of poverty, that extra 18 cents an hour can mean the difference between food on the table and none. It can enable a battered wife to break away from her abusive spouse. It can pay the tuition for night school, so that women can climb out of the pink collar ghetto.

Eighteen cents is chump change to the employers of this country. And yet, they begrudge it to the women who raise this country’s children. And they dread having to hand over that other 33 cents that they currently pocket as profit. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, enacted by the Democratic Congress and signed into law by President Obama is a thorn in the side of the Right. The National Association of Manufacturers lobbied against it, on the ground that existing legislation was more than adequate to protect the rights of women---even though existing legislation still left women in this country 33 cents short.

http://www.nam.org/~/media/1C646E08B3F5440AAE75145BCB33689A/NAMLedbetterOppositionLtr7Jan2009v4.pdf

Dixie Cup, aka the Koch Brothers, aka the Cato Institute declared that the law was a “Sword of Damocles” that threatened the economy----because, apparently, the economy only thrives when women do the same work as men for a fraction of their wage.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/fair-pay-act-will-only-further-damage-economy/

In the face of federal legislation that makes it easier for women to sue for past wage discrimination, what is the right wing to do? Answer, strip away the reproductive rights that women have gained. Deny women birth control. Force them to give birth to children they cannot afford.

Then, the Dixie Cup manufacturers of this nation can assert, with confidence, “I don’t need to pay that woman an equal wage. She will just get pregnant and leave me in the lurch. Seventy-seven cents is too much for her. She should be happy with the 59 cents her mother made.” Never mind that single mothers in this country are overwhelming working mothers and that maternity leave is a luxury almost unheard of in the U.S.A.

The Koch Brothers don’t give a damn about your unborn child. Newt Gingrich could care less that your IUD may prevent implantation. Mitt Romney does not lose sleep at night knowing that your employer sponsored health insurance pays for your birth control pill. What they really care about is that 18 cents that women’s reproductive rights have cost them---and the 33 cents they stand to lose if the current trend continues.

And for all you guys out there, remember. When the wages of women and minorities are kept artificially low, all workers get paid less. Law of supply and demand.

“Needless to say, sexism emerged as a source of outrageous super-profits for the capitalists.”
Angela Davis Women, Race & Class