Comparable worth crack-up
Monday, October 6th, 2008 By Mike Maurer
Clint Bolick aptly describes what’s wrong with comparable worth: It’s a bureaucratic effort to show that two jobs are the same, and therefore should receive the same pay, if the “composite of skill, effort, responsibility and work conditions are equivalent in value, even if the jobs are dissimilar.”
Let’s make this easy. Let’s give Joe Sixpack a backhoe and a hardhat and let’s give Sally Cupcake a backhoe and a hardhat and tell each of them to excavate 800 cubic yards of soil, and what the heck let’s specify in each case that it’s sandy loam. Can we all agree that, by golly, our composite of skill, effort, responsibility and work conditions is the same? And heck, let’s go even further and suppose that each of them has 100 hours of backhoe training and went to the very same schools all the way through and earned the very same grades. All my liberal friends comfy that we’re talking apples to apples?
Now we tell Sally to go excavate her 800 cubic yards in the next Maronda Homes subdivision. Let’s say she earns $1,500 gross, $800 net for doing so. Then we tell Joe to park his backhoe on the Statehouse lawn to excavate his 800 cubic yards. Assuming, counterfactually, that he isn’t turned into a sieve by statehouse security, his reward won’t be $800 net. His reward will be five to ten in the Big House.
But here’s the real shocker: The analysis is exactly the same if Sally’s and Joe’s roles are switched. Yes, it’s true. No ACLU lawsuit necessary.
Folks, it’s a fact that big entertainers and big football players earn more than really, really, really good teachers, and it’s perfectly reasonable to conclude that in spite of this differential in earning power, what the teacher does is vastly more important. Life is full of many such oddities. That’s not an injustice. It’s basic economics.
