McCain Needs A Little Education
He’s kidding right? McCain opposes the equal pay measure because it would result in more lawsuits? Nice logic. Perhaps we should stop protecting all kinds of rights because of all the trouble they cause? Like the right to own a gun for instance? Or the right to free assembly? Or the right not to be tortured. Oh, wait, I forgot that the Bush Administration, with McCain’s help, is taking care of that one.
But what makes me really mad about McCain’s opposition to the equal pay measure, is the fact that his solution to the problem is to suggest that women need more “education and training.” The idea that women need more training or education to even things up so to speak is, not only extremely condescending, it’s incorrect. Women make less than men consistently, across all education levels even when factoring in parenthood, hours worked, and occupations. So no matter how much training or education women seem to get, they can expect to make less than their male counterparts. Even when women make the same choices as men (educational or otherwise), they end up earning less (AAUW Foundation research report). John McCain should be just as concerned about that as any woman, not because he is running for president, but because he has daughters who are already part of the American workplace.
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Right on target!
This supposed need for more “education and training” that McCain and other conservatives always advance as an answer for pay-rate complaints is an insulting and disingenuous sham. They seem to assume that wages and salaries in the working world are all determined by some kind of objective reality, when in fact this has never been true.
What people earn is often based on arbitrary decisions by those who have the power to set pay-rates. This can be seen in how job compensation has changed over the last 20 to 30 years. A lot of the same types of work that used to pay good wages in the 70’s and earlier now pay much less relative to the cost of living. One of the reasons many people have to struggle to make ends meet more nowadays than in the past is that those at the top are now taking a much bigger cut of the value that they produce.
Education and training are sometimes related to how much people are paid, but often they are not. Many other factors are often involved in what people can earn, including various kinds of discrimination. I think it shows how insular and out of touch Republicans like McCain are that they seem to believe the working world is some kind of self-regulating meritocracy.
excellent points!