Comparable Worth: Feminism Turning to Paternalism; W. McElroy

380 ComparableWorth: FeminismTurning to Paternalism by WendyMcElroy O ne of the most controversial feminist issues of the 1990s will be comparable worth-the idea that women should be paid the same as men in jobs of comparable value. Advocates claim that pay equity would strike at the very heart of gender discrimination. Thus, the free market could be converted into an instrument of social justice, rather than one of oppression. More specifically,advocates claim that compara ble worth would eliminate the wage gap-the wage disparity whereby women who work full time are reported to receive only 60 cents for every dollar received by men. It is with the socio-economic goal of wage justice that many recent lawsuits concern ing comparable worth have been launched. Understandably, economists and businessmen have been reluctant to transform the marketplace into a tool for social reform. In general, their criti cisms of comparable worth have focused on sever al economic issues. They contend that the wage gap has been vastly exaggerated; comparable worth will price American products out of world markets; it will overprice the labor of women, thus creating unemployment for them; and it willpenal ize individual employers for following a wage structure dictated by the free market.

But lurking beneath the surface of the economic debate are more fundamental disagreements. Sev eral assumptions underlie the comparable worth controversy. Ms. McElroy is the editor ofFreedom, Feminism, and the State (Cato Institute, 1982), which was recently repub lished as a university text by Holmes and Meier. Perhaps the most basic assumption of compara ble worth is that the marketplace is incapable of providing justice. What else can explain the fact that a nurse, who preserves human life, is paid less than most garbage men? To these reformers, the market has been corrupted by centuries of dis crimination, and must be corrected by legislation. Critics of comparable worth counter that the marketplace was never meant to be an arena of social reform. It is simply a coordinating mecha nism that tends to balance demand with supply. The price of labor, like the price of any other com modity, doesn't express a moral ideal, but the pref erences of buyers and sellers in the market. To these critics, the marketplace is a mirror of society.

To attack it is, at best, to attack the reflection of dis crimination-not the cause or the source. It is like breaking a looking glassbecause it reflects too well. Moreover, they point to instances where the free market has worked against discrimination. In South Africa, for example, government policies impose discrimination upon the market. Never theless, native laborers tend to go wherever there is work. Despite government fines and penalties, employers hire cheap black labor. Government regulations cannot change the economic law of supply and demand; all they can do is make it func tion in back alleys and underground. Another fundamental difference in theory soon arises. Advocates of comparable worth believe that there is an inherently just wage attached to every category of labor. This "just wage" is sup posed to be independent of market forces-labor is alleged to have an economic value apart from what anyone is willing to pay for it.

InherentValue? The concept of inherent value is nothing new. It dates back to the medieval guilds, which deter mined and enforced a "just price" for the goods they produced. More recently, Karl Marx put forth a labor theory of value, by which goods had inher ent worth based on the labor required to produce them. If a worker received compensation below this just price, the discrepancy was said to be stolen money. Unfortunately for these theories, they don't explain the world around us. If commodities have inherent worth, how can we account for the price fluctuations we see in world markets every day? Moreover, any skill is economically worthless if someone isn't willing to pay for it. But the concept of inherent worth raises at least two other sticky questions: what is the measure of worth, and who willjudge it? If the marketplace is an expression of discrimination, then any fair mea sure of worth must be independent of it. Neverthe less, advocates of comparable worth fall back upon the market price for labor as the only real standard available. Using this shaky starting point, reform ers search for an objective standard of a just wage.

Perhaps the most influential of these new stan dards is the one generated in 1974 by the consult ing firm of Norman Willis & Associates when it performed a comparable worth study for the State of Washington. This study assigned numerical scores to all classes of labor on the basis of four fac tors: knowledge and skills; mental demands; accountability; and working conditions. Commit381 tees then added up the numerical scores of differ ent jobs and ranked them with respect to each oth er. Their findings, along with "expert" testimony, were offered to the courts as proof of the need for comparable worth legislation. But these so-called objective results depended entirely upon who the experts were and who hired them. After all, the very attempt to measure value requires a concept of what value is, and this is sub jective. The subjectivity has been highlighted by discrepancies within comparable worth studies themselves. For example, in Minnesota, a regis tered nurse, a chemist, and a social worker were ranked as equal. In Iowa, a nurse ranked 29 per cent higher than a social worker, who ranked 11 percent higher than a chemist. This is a strange objectivity.

A New Paternalism The controversy over comparable worth is not merely between advocates and denigrators of the free market. It is within the roots of feminism itself. Feminism of the late 1960s and early 19708 called upon women to become independent-"A woman's body, a woman's right." Historically, the movement recognized that government legislation had been one of the major barriers to women own ing land, negotiating their own contracts ... being economic persons in their own right. But feminism in the 1990s is calling upon the government to intervene in women's economic negotiations for the purpose of securing justice. There is a word for such intervention: paternalism. Paternalism is a word most often used with regard to mental in competents and children. As a feminist, I shudder to see it now applied to women. D OppressiveGovernment T hroughout the ages the market order has been most supportive of women's rights .... The political command order, in contrast, reveals an uninterrupted record of discrimination. It applies the force of government to benefit one class of subjects at the expense of another class. It thrives on the political support from its beneficiaries, and brushes aside the protests of its victims.

-HANS F. SENNHOLZ, "Women, Work and Wages" IDEAS ON LIBERTY 382 CableTV Needs Competition by John Merline C onsumer complaints about rising cable rates and declining service have spurred . Congress to rethink its 1984cable-deregu lation law. According to Senator John Danforth, "Cable rates have increased because of the dereg ulation of the 1984Cable Act." So legislators have moved to undo the "damage" done six years ago, by reimposing rate regulation. As is too often the case when addressing eco nomic issues, Congress is looking at only half the picture. While the 1984 Act deregulated cable rates(forbidding most citiesfrom setting rate caps), it did nothing to break up the local monopolies that, in most cities, provide cable to consumers. Of the 9,000 cable markets, only about 45 are competitive. The rest are operated as local monop olies, with the city government deciding before hand which company will be the sole provider.