Mitt Romney has had a spotty record on fair pay for women. In April, the campaign told the Huffington Post's Sam Stein that it would "get back" to him on Romney's stance on the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. The Romney campaign later said the candidate "supports pay equity and is not looking to change current law," but still wouldn't divulge whether he supports the Ledbetter law.
As early as tomorrow, the Senate will vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act, which seeks to guarantee that men and women receive the same pay for the same work and is a follow up to the Ledbetter law. Most Democrats are expected to support the bill while most Republicans are expected to oppose it.
Now, Romney is waffling again. Earlier Monday,The Rachel Maddow Show asked Romney's campaign where he stands on the new bill. It responded with a statement:
Of course Governor Romney supports pay equity for women. In order to have pay equity, women need to have jobs, and they have been getting crushed in this economy, losing far more jobs than men. As president, Mitt Romney will create a pro-jobs business climate that will put all Americans back to work.
In other words, it declined to say.
The show asked once again and received the response, "Governor Romney supports pay equity for women." The show followed up a third time. Nothing.
So what exactly is Romney's position on the Paycheck Fairness Act? That's anyone's guess.
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This guy is straight up chicken sh*t. He can't say definitively whether or not he supports a piece of legislation?
America, don't elect this person. Sometimes it goes beyond policy to character, Romney lacks it.
How can anyone honestly say they believe Romney would be an effective leader, when he has yet to show leadership in any capacity during the campaign?
I implore Amercia not to elect Romney either.
For starters, theres already been a bill for this since 1963, Equality pay act.
The truth is, He doesn't support it for good reasons but more than half of America is too ignorant to forsee the ramifications so he can't tell you so.
Key facts on what democrats pay women employees compared to male employees:
Patty Murray (D., Wash.) pays her female staffers 35.2% less than her male staffers. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) pays her female staffers 41%! less than her male staffers. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) pays her female staffers only 7.3% less than her male staffers, but still less. Why? Here are some other Senators and their men-women pay-differences: Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D., N.M.)—40 percent, Sen. Jon Tester (D., Mont.)—34.2 percent, Sen. Ben Cardin (D., Md.)—31.5 percent, Sen. Tom Carper (D., Del.)—30.4 percent, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.)–29.7 percent, Sen. Kent Conrad (D., N.D.)–29.2 percent, Sen. Bill Nelson (D., Fla.)—26.5 percent, Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore)—26.4 percent, Sen. Tom Harkin (D., Iowa)—23.2 percent. And because the SCAT Act, as I propose it, governs the House of Representatives, too, here is an example for the House: Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) 27.6%. Should we penalize the White House, too, for paying women less than men? Barack Hussein (D., Ill) 18%!
Romney has yet to perceive himself in the eyes of the majority of Americans as anything other than a mysterious candidate. He will eventually have to let America know what he actually stands for in the upcoming debate, and hope that he fairs well against the criticism for it.
But for now, in the eyes of the media outlet and the middle class/poor, we all know from history that he has yet to do so. If this keeps up, he would lose the votes he claims as 'desperately needed'.
Here's what Romney will say sooner or later:
The sole driving force behind the Paycheck Fairness Act, as well as the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, is the belief that women earn 77 cents to men's dollar in the same jobs.
Contrary to what pay-equity advocates say, “Women's 77 cents to men's dollar” does NOT mean women are paid less than men in the same jobs. Nor does it mean, even more incredibly in the vein of “men are stronger than women” (which means to many that every man is stronger than every woman), that every woman earns 23% less than every man, perhaps leading some of the more benighted and the blinkered ideological to believe Diane Sawyer of ABC News earns less than the young man walking back and forth on the street wearing a “Pizzas $5” sign.
The figures are arrived at by comparing the sexes' median incomes: women's median is 77 percent of men's. In 2009, the median income of full-time, year-round workers was $47,127 for men, compared to $36,278 for women or 77 percent of men's median. http://www.catalyst.org/publication/217/womens-earnings-and-income
Median means 50% of workers earn above the figures and 50% below. That means that a lot of female workers in the higher ranges of women's median make more money than a lot of male workers in the lower ranges of men's median.
“Women's 77 cents to men's dollar” doesn't account for the number of hours worked each week, experience, seniority, training, education or even the job description itself. It compares all women to all men, not people in the same job with the same experience. So the salary of a 60-year-old male computer engineer with 30 years at his company is weighed against that of a young first-year female teacher. Also, men are much more likely than women to work two jobs; hence, more often than women, a man earning $50,000 from his two jobs is weighed against a women earning $25,000 from her one job, so that he appears to be unfairly earning twice as much as she.
Over the decades, strategically ignoring the true meaning of "women's 77 cents to men's dollar" has been less than productive:
No law yet has closed the gender wage gap — not the 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, not Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, not the 1991 amendments to Title VII, not affirmative action (which has benefited mostly white women, the group most vocal about the wage gap - http://tinyurl.com/74cooen), not diversity, not the countless state and local laws and regulations, not the horde of overseers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and not the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.... Nor will a "paycheck fairness" law work.
That's because women's pay-equity advocates, who always insist one more law is needed, continue to overlook the effects of female AND male behavior:
Despite the 40-year-old demand for women's equal pay, millions of wives still choose to have no pay at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of "The Secrets of Happily Married Women," stay-at-home wives, including the childless who represent an estimated 10 percent, constitute a growing niche. "In the past few years,” he says in a CNN report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier....” at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka. If indeed a higher percentage of women is staying at home, perhaps it's because feminists and the media have told women for years that female workers are paid less than men in the same jobs — so why bother working if they're going to be penalized and humiliated for being a woman.)
As full-time mothers or homemakers, stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living in luxury? Because they're supported by their husband, an “employer” who pays them to stay at home.
The implication of this is probably obvious to 10-year-olds but seems incomprehensible to or is ignored by feminists and the liberal media: If millions of wives are able to accept NO wages, millions of other wives, whose husbands' incomes range from moderate to high, are able to:
-accept low wages
-refuse overtime and promotions
-choose jobs based on interest first, wages second — the reverse of what men tend to do
-take more unpaid days off
-avoid uncomfortable wage-bargaining (http://tinyurl.com/3a5nlay)
-work part-time instead of full-time
All of which lower women's median pay.
Women are able to make these choices because they are supported — or if unmarried anticipate being supported — by a husband who must earn more than if he'd chosen never to marry. (Still, even many men who shun marriage, unlike their female counterparts, feel their self worth is tied to their net worth.) This is how MEN help create the wage gap: as a group they pass up jobs that interest them for ones that pay well. If the roles were reversed so that men raised the children and women raised the income, men would average lower pay than women.
Points to ponder:
Why would "greedy, profit-obsessed" employers, many of whom where possible hire illegal immigrants for their cheap labor, pay men more than women for the same work? If employers could get away with that, they would not hire one man, ever.
The power in money is not in earning it (there is only responsibility, sweat, and stress in earning money). The power in money is in SPENDING it. And, Warren Farrell says in “The Myth of Male Power” at http://www.warrenfarrell.org/TheBook/index.html, "Women control consumer spending by a wide margin in virtually every consumer category." (Women's control over spending, adds Farrell, gives women control over TV programs.)
“There were fewer cases charging sex-based wage discrimination last year than the year before the [Ledbetter law] was signed, and the wage gap was wider in 2010 than it was in 2007.... The bottom line: In Obama’s first three years in office, the EEOC filed six gender-based wage discrimination lawsuits — down from 18 during Bush’s second term." -BusinessWeek, May 13, 2012, at http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-17/to-lure-womens-votes-obama-turns-to-lilly-ledbetter” and at http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-05-13/obama-pitches-equal-pay-to-win-women-even-as-charges-drop
Excerpted from "Will the Ledbetter Act Help Women?" at http://malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/will-the-ledbetter-fair-pay-act-help-women/