Crab apples by Rod Van Mechelen Copyright 1996 by Rod Van Mechelen R ecently, a pundit on the radio complained that a woman who answers phones and greets customers in an office makes much less than a man who answers phones and greets customers in a police precinct office. The feminist hacks are getting wily. All employers are not alike. Making blanket assertions about the entire workforce on the basis of cross-employer comparisons is ingenuous.
Some employers pay more, some pay less.
Everybody knows Microsoft pays less than industry standard wages and salaries, and that an administrative assistant at Big Green is unlikely to take home as much on payday as he or she would at, say, a unionized giant like Boeing or United Parcel Service. Even belonging to a union doesn't guarantee you'll make the same as someone who belongs to the same union you do, does the same job you do, but works for a different company. A riveter at a Chrysler plant can't necessarily expect the same pay as a riveter at a Saturn plant. All employers are not alike. Regardless of how you feel about that, the femigogues serve no one except themselves by playing a shell game where the equal pay for equal work pea starts out under the shell of each individual employer over here, and suddenly shows up under the collective shell of all employers over there.