Living Wages, Equal Wages: Gender and Labour Market Policies in the United States

"I chose this book because it shows you that wage setting is a political and cultural process, and not just an economic process. When you study economics and you study how wages are set, you look at supply and demand and you get the incorrect impression that wages are a price like anything else. This book shows you that setting wages is a social practice. It is not just a rational economic calculation of costs and benefits. It is a very detailed look at the wage setting process. The authors argue that wage setting is a human story, not just an impersonal narrative of demand and supply functions. They have a wonderful discussion of the process of job evaluation: how employers figure out which jobs should be highly paid and which jobs should not. The question of comparable worth, what jobs are worth in society, goes even beyond what employers do. So, for example, in the US, parking lot attendants, people who take your car and park it for you, earn about $20,000 a year. The average earnings of a worker in a childcare centre, who has a similar level of education as a parking lot attendant, earns about $18,000 a year. How can it be that we all value what childcare workers do so much more than what parking lot attendants do, and yet parking lot attendants get paid slightly more? Living Wages, Equal Wages carefully analyses these kinds of questions. Why is it that things that we value get paid so poorly? Teaching in the US is a very poorly paid job. Right now, the teachers who work in San Francisco, which is one of the highest cost of living cities in the country, can’t even afford to live there. The city is now trying to figure out how to provide housing for teachers, and ditto for firefighters. You don’t want your firefighters living in another city, in case you need them urgently. We have all these paradoxes around how wages are set, and Living Wages, Equal Wages really causes us to think about these issues and also to see how we might intervene in this process. I don’t think it is just a question of supply and demand. I think one of the reasons women are getting more college degrees in the US than men is because there are occupations available to men without college degrees that are simply not available to women. So, for example, women have not made many inroads into the construction industry. There are very few women carpenters, electricians and plumbers. These are all occupations where people can earn a decent wage with relatively low levels of education. Since the executive orders have stopped being enforced, government contractors in construction are not looking to hire more women into those occupations. Many still believe, in their heart of hearts, that a woman’s place is in the home and that men should be earning wages to support their families. In the US, about 50% of people who’ve been polled about whether the best situation is for women to be at home with their children say, ‘Yes, the best situation is for women to be full-time Moms.’ Of course, those people say, if the husband can’t earn enough, or the woman has no husband, then she has to be at work. But that’s a second best solution for them. As long as there’s a substantial percentage of people who feel that way, society is going to ensure that men have the better jobs. I believe it is a revolutionary book that everybody needs to read. They present data on how children of working mothers do just fine. In fact, they do better than fine. I remember, when I first started out, there were articles that asked questions such as ‘Do working mothers increase juvenile delinquency?’ You can tell how long ago that was, because we don’t use the term juvenile delinquency any more. People were looking for the ill effects of mothers’ employment. Now people recognize that mothers’ employment can have very positive effects on their children, in addition to providing economic benefits."