Where's my twelve cents?
Apr. 29th, 2009 09:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sev(I have not yet gotten to the 'what about the menz' posts; this is something else entirely.)
Have you called your congresscritter about the Employee Free Choice Act or the Paycheck Fairness Act yet? Yesterday was Fair Pay Day; read about this stuff at a feminist blog near you. Today I read a Feministe repost of an earlier guest post by Sarah Jaffe as well as Sarah's Blog for Equal Pay Day post on her own blog.
And I want my goddamned twelve cents. (that's the conservative number, from the GAO. Yes, the one you get after you control for all the variables; the pervasive myth that controlling for occupation, industry, race, marital status and job tenure wipes out the wage gap is a horseshit excuse to try to avoid social justice, so cut it out.)
I've noticed that support for unions among mainstream liberals decreases as the percentage of women in unions rises. Don't just say "I've got mine! Don't need 'em anymore!" We are here -- with a reasonably-sized workweek, worker protections, maternity leave, minimum wage and on, and on, and on -- because of unions. They're not out-of-usefulness just because the average middle-class worker has most (but not all) of the benefits unions have fought for over the decades.
WE'RE NOT DONE. Corporations still exploit workers for the bottom line; now they just claim they have a right and responsibility "to shareholders" to address "labor costs." I call bullshit. Treating your workers as valuable human beings instead of resources to be exploited has been shown time and again to be *good* for the bottom line (q.v. Riane Eisler's Real Wealth of Nations to name an accessible-to-the-layman text that talks about this. Note that I Am Not An Economist, and I believe neither is she.)
To quote Sarah Jaffe in the Feministe post: "Unions ... do and have done more to improve the living standards of American workers than anything else."
Enough with getting wishy-washy about labor rights, people. We're not done.
Have you called your congresscritter about the Employee Free Choice Act or the Paycheck Fairness Act yet? Yesterday was Fair Pay Day; read about this stuff at a feminist blog near you. Today I read a Feministe repost of an earlier guest post by Sarah Jaffe as well as Sarah's Blog for Equal Pay Day post on her own blog.
And I want my goddamned twelve cents. (that's the conservative number, from the GAO. Yes, the one you get after you control for all the variables; the pervasive myth that controlling for occupation, industry, race, marital status and job tenure wipes out the wage gap is a horseshit excuse to try to avoid social justice, so cut it out.)
I've noticed that support for unions among mainstream liberals decreases as the percentage of women in unions rises. Don't just say "I've got mine! Don't need 'em anymore!" We are here -- with a reasonably-sized workweek, worker protections, maternity leave, minimum wage and on, and on, and on -- because of unions. They're not out-of-usefulness just because the average middle-class worker has most (but not all) of the benefits unions have fought for over the decades.
WE'RE NOT DONE. Corporations still exploit workers for the bottom line; now they just claim they have a right and responsibility "to shareholders" to address "labor costs." I call bullshit. Treating your workers as valuable human beings instead of resources to be exploited has been shown time and again to be *good* for the bottom line (q.v. Riane Eisler's Real Wealth of Nations to name an accessible-to-the-layman text that talks about this. Note that I Am Not An Economist, and I believe neither is she.)
To quote Sarah Jaffe in the Feministe post: "Unions ... do and have done more to improve the living standards of American workers than anything else."
Enough with getting wishy-washy about labor rights, people. We're not done.