Equal pay for equal work’ is this fair?
There is not, and can never be, any logical argument against equality of payment for the same work as between men and women. It is true that men do certain jobs better than women, or quicker, and the reverse holds good about other jobs. But is ‘equal work’ which is under consideration and payment for any type of work, performed by anybody, is always the least that the employer can get away with. In other words, pay rates are fixed by two factors; firstly the supply of labor available for a particular job. Scarce labor for skilled jobs tends to push up wages, coupled with the fact that skilled workers will revert to laboring jobs unless they are paid extra for the use of their skill. secondly, the government and the trade unions have a hand in rate-fixing, as well as the employer. If the cost of living index rises, the unions will call a strike for more pay, and they will always, in a free economy, press for not only a realistic wage level, but also a share in the profits of the firm, which are otherwise paid to the government in the form of taxation, to the shareholders as dividends, or ploughed back into the firm for development. The fact that in many countries, women are paid a lower rate for doing the same job merely indicates that, on the whole, most women are not union minded. They are relatively unorganized, because most of them do not bring in the basic income on which the family, if any, depends. Moreover, they are available in large numbers for a short-term employment and for most married women at any rate, their, ‘heart’ isn’t in the prospect of a life time’s employment.
And this raises the argument often advanced against equal pay for women. Single women do not need the same pay as married men. Yet what about their old-age ? Married woman’s pay is additional, while the married man’s is basic to the family. The bachelor will probably get married any way and acquire responsibilities.
Women may well ask by what right an employer presumes to assess the income he pays his employees by a prior examination of their domestic commitments, when in fact, he is paying everybody the lowest wage he can. And, of course, in more advanced countries, these anomalies of sex are being ironed out, based as they are on the old system of regarding the female of the species as inferior to the male. Already in more westernized countries, women have achieved parity in matters of property and the franchise. It is now a short step to accord them equality of pay.
The fact that women on the whole suffer this inequality still is well and truly based on historic. For this purpose, we can discount the various national and racial customs of the Far East, because we are thinking in terms of industrialized, i.e westernized countries, where a real similarity of conditions exist to those of USA and Europe. Britain was the first country in the world to become fully industrialized, a process completed between 1733 and 1850 — and the background of British thought about female labor followed the commercial and industrial flag of Britain Overseas, and fitted in very well with local ideas of the inequality of women. Women themselves have long since exploded this myth by means of their own efforts and have entered successfully into every sphere of male occupation, heavy engineering and the mines included. Today, quite rightly, they are debarred from nothing.
So the crux of the matter is the British background. From 1733, until at least 1914, and in some respects later the upper and middle classes considered it degrading for a female to earn money at all. Lower-class women worked as helps to their husbands — in the fields, brickyards, foundries and the mills. They had no rights and expected nothing, but toil and an early death. (Unmarried women and spinsters far outnumbered jobs.) There was no state benefit for unemployment, so thousands had to tolerate the working conditions and poor wages, or starve.
The development of factories led to the concentration of populations in the towns. Prices rose, and men’s wages never kept pace, so women had to work to supplement the family income — and again for what they could get, which was very little. Today, curiously enough, married women again work, usually from economic necessity. It is now more a matter of improving an already reasonable standard of living. And there is no moral reason why they should not do so, or receive the correct economic rate for the job they do — not the sex they belong to.
Inequalities are historically based in snobbery and economic oppression, not in any careful assessment of financial commitments, and it is high time these remaining inequalities were ironed out everywhere.
