Anyone who understood even elementary economics, and Long obviously does not, would understand why. If wage equity is to have any meaning it must be that employees should get the full value of their marginal products. This is precisely what the market tends to bring about. The Spanish Scholastics fully understood this and that is why they called the market wage the just wage . His suggestion that women receive less pay because they have little industrial muscle and almost no access to formal enterprise bargaining is sheer nonsense.
Women tend to be on lower wages because they usually work in low productivity jobs.
That a journalist' writing for a financial newspaper does not understand this is a disgrace. He followed this up with another suggestion that deregulation will further widen the gender pay gap . Long finished with the absurd assertion that growing wage inequality tends to support claims made by the Brotherhood of St. Laurence, the ACTU et al that wage poverty is emerging. Now these outfits claim that deregulated labour markets lower wages. What they deliberately ignore is that unions are the greatest cause of poverty in this country.