On The Fair Pay Act

Here's some info on the Fair Pay Act, courtesy of the National Committee on Pay Equity:

The major provision of the Fair Pay Act prohibits wage discrimination based on sex, race, or national origin among employees for work in "equivalent jobs." Equivalent jobs are those whose composite of skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions are equivalent in value, even if the jobs are dissimilar. The Act is a natural extension of the 1963 Equal Pay Act, which is limited to sex-based discrimination in the same jobs. For enforcement purposes, the Fair Pay Act allows class action lawsuits to be filed and provides for compensatory and punitive damages. It also fills the information gap for workers by requiring some employers to disclose to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) general job classifications and their pay statistics (although it maintains individual confidentiality). The bill prohibits a company from lowering any employee's wage rate in order to implement fair pay.

In other words, it's a feast for lawyers. 

How do you determine if pay is "fair" between dissimilar occupations? 

There has been a variety of experiences with pay equity implementation. In a school district, elementary school head secretaries were compared to audiovisual technicians. In a hospital, registered nursing assistants were compared to plumbers. In a shoe factory, console operators/sample stitchers were compared to cutters. In a retail food chain, cashiers and meat wrappers were compared to stock clerks. In state and municipal governments, job evaluation systems have allowed comparisons to be made between many female- and male-dominated jobs. These have included comparing Clerk Typists and Custodians; Secretaries and Lab Technicians; Finance Clerks and Maintenance Workers; Emergency Services Operators and Fire Dispatchers; and Dining Hall Coordinators and Automotive Parts Technicians. Through collective bargaining negotiations, Social Workers in a large county received a pay adjustment after being compared to Parole Officers.

In other words, the National Committee on Pay Equity will decide.  With the lawyers.  God help us all.  Your boss might consider giving you a raise instead of that slacker in the next cubicle, but would it be worth the risk? 

Ok, here's a thought experiment....  Name two people who have done your job, for the same time, who works as hard as you, with the same results that you achieve. 

You have thirty more seconds. 

Pencils down.  Turn in your papers. 

If you were able to think of anyone who has done your job for the same time with the same effort with the same results, you are probably unemployed.  Equality isn't possible for longer than 3 days on a job.   

This is the Obama Camp's opening salvo in the non-war on women from the Obama Camp. 

Government intervention in the price of something decreases demand for the thing.  There is going to be more money for lawyers, more money for government salary evaluators, and less money for you. 

Perhaps I've exagerrated.  Obama may wind up doing the exact job, for the same duration, with the same results as.....Jimmy Carter. 

What your employees have been doing - DEA edition

From The New York Holy Times:

WASHINGTON — The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables.

In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to some news organizations, offer glimpses of drug agents balancing diplomacy and law enforcement in places where it can be hard to tell the politicians from the traffickers, and where drug rings are themselves mini-states whose wealth and violence permit them to run roughshod over struggling governments.

Diplomats recorded unforgettable vignettes from the largely unseen war on drugs:

¶In Panama, an urgent BlackBerry message from the president to the American ambassador demanded that the D.E.A. go after his political enemies: “I need help with tapping phones.”

¶In Sierra Leone, a major cocaine-trafficking prosecution was almost upended by the attorney general’s attempt to solicit $2.5 million in bribes.

¶In Guinea, the country’s biggest narcotics kingpin turned out to be the president’s son, and diplomats discovered that before the police destroyed a huge narcotics seizure, the drugs had been replaced by flour.

¶Leaders of Mexico’s beleaguered military issued private pleas for closer collaboration with the drug agency, confessing that they had little faith in their own country’s police forces.

¶Cables from Myanmar, the target of strict United States sanctions, describe the drug agency informants’ reporting both on how the military junta enriches itself with drug money and on the political activities of the junta’s opponents.

Officials of the D.E.A. and the State Department declined to discuss what they said was information that should never have been made public.

No, it should have been made public.  We need another political party representing us in Washington, one that will make a few trips to PetSmart to purchase some shorter leashes. 
These guys need to be put on one.