LTE FOS Concerning Equal Pay For Women

On Friday, April 11, 2014 the 'Morning Call' published a letter to the editor entitled "Issue of unequal pay for women a 'pack of lies'""Anybody who tells you that women don't get the same pay for the same job as a man is either misinformed, a fraud or a liar or knows of a crime being committed. The pack of lies, repeated ad nauseam, that women make only 77 percent of what a man makes is based on earnings in total, not on specific jobs...

Substitute black or Hispanic for women in all of the above and you'd show the same results. However, everybody knows racial discrimination is illegal. Everybody should know that since the 1963 Equal Pay Act that sexual pay discrimination is illegal."Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but they are meaningless without facts that support them. The writer then goes on to bash Obama. Writing letters to the editor calling others "misinformed, a fraud or a liar" make they themselves look like the very thing they accuse others of when facts do not support them in any way.

As far as for him calling for breaking things down by "specific jobs". If your going to start cherry picking, rather then looking at the whole, I can manipulate these stats to come out in any way I fancy. First he argues about all things being equal,"same pay for the same job as a man". Then wants to rearrange the deck chairs by skewing the numbers to make his numbers work for him by breaking things down to "specific jobs". What are the jobs men do that women don't? Apparently he wants to separate the boys from the girls when it comes to the kind of jobs each should be doing. That's no way to do an analysis

The best information we have to go on is put out by the 'Bureau Of Labor Statistics'. A table put out by the BLS indicates in 2012 the families in which both wives and husbands have earnings, only 29% of wives earn more than their husbands. It was last modified March 24th, 2014. In other words 71% of the husbands earn more then their wives.

The writer also spoke about black & Hispanic women receiving equal treatment under 1963 Equal Pay Act. Again this writer is dead wrong. Here is a chart included in the 91 page BLS October 2013 report entitled "Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2012" (PDF)

The chart above represents all the women's median weekly earnings as of 2012. Not just the married. These are full-time wage and salary workers by sex, race, and Hispanic or Latino ethnicity. As one can plainly see overall there is no equality for women whether they are married, single or of a minority.

Look In The Mirror
Unless this letter writer has a better source then the latest BLS statistics, his whole hypothesis comes from a man whom he himself very well may be "nothing more then a man is either misinformed, a fraud or a liar." However, I would prefer not to use the same words as he did. Rather I'd prefer to say this person can be excused by his being ignorant of the facts in an attempt to get at Obama. Which I suspect was his main agenda rather then a concern over women's pay inequality.

REFERENCE SOURCE:
BLS: "Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey"