As I was browsing through recent news stories in search of a topic to enlighten my readership with my opinionated blathering, I came across a headline that rather excited me. It stated Wisconsin’s Senate is considering re-enacting the Equal Pay Enforcement Act, giving citizens more opportunity to receive damages upon realizing they are discriminated against by their employers. It would allow them to sue in state court to receive the pay they deserve. This law would mostly benefit women, as they are the most common victims of pay discrimination. It just warms my heart to know our state Legislature is considering taking equality seriously and even considering the heretofore inconceivable idea that women are equal to men. Our laws are obviously on the cutting edge of social progress. Good job, Wisconsin.
Wisconsin actually had the Equal Pay Enforcement Act before. It was passed in 2009 and brought Wisconsin up from 36th to 24th in terms of income equality, but was repealed last year by Gov. Scott Walker and Republicans in the state Legislature. According to Walker, the act was only an excuse for trial lawyers to clog up the legal system. Walker repealed the act because the best way to prevent strain on the justice system is to keep it from doing its job.
Proponents of the Equal Pay Enforcement Act claim the act did not actually end up increasing the number of gender-discrimination suits in state courts, as just the act itself and the risk of suit was enough to prevent gender discrimination by employers. If I’ve learned one thing from studying U.S. politics, it’s that people will do the right thing when doing the wrong thing can get them sued. Government regulations on businesses are in place simply to make the right thing the financially beneficial thing.
Clogged legal system or not, there is a huge wage disparity between men and women. In this shining beacon of enlightenment and equality we call America, women make only 77 percent of what men make. In Wisconsin, women only make 75 percent of men’s pay. This is, by its mathematical definition, inequality. We cannot say women and men are treated equally until we get rid of this disparity. Seventy-seven cents does not equal one dollar. One should hope the people in charge of managing our government’s money would know that.
Rather than ignore it like Walker, some politicians prefer to justify the wage gap. Republican Wisconsin Sen. Glenn Grothman’s said the income gap exists because men care more about money and work harder for it. Men simply care more about work and doing a good job than women, he explained. He added women are too busy raising children to focus on their careers.
Grothman does not seem to realize that outside of the familiar world of the inside of his lower digestive tract, women are not domestic property confined to the home and limited to raising children and doing housework. They are in fact real people who can do real-people things and should be paid real-people wages.
My point is it’s absolutely ridiculous that in 2013 equal pay is an issue that even needs to be discussed. Here it is almost 100 years after the 19th amendment and women are still only worth 77 percent of a man. A hundred years from now Walker, Grothman and all of the opponents of the Equal Pay Enforcement Act will look almost as stupid as opponents of women’s suffrage in the 1910s.
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