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From: turpin@cs.utexas.EDU (Russell Turpin)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: On homemakers and comparable worth.
Message-ID: <8777@cs.utexas.edu>
Date: 5 Jun 90 21:17:39 GMT
Organization: U. Texas CS Dept., Austin, Texas
Lines: 118
Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu

-----
A few days ago, I read in the local paper about a study
purporting that homemakers who lose their spousal income due to
death or disability of their spouse, divorce, or economic
circumstance fare poorly in the work world.  A common explanation
for this is that "woman's work" is undervalued in patriarchal
society.  This explanation is largely wrong, and reveals mistaken
thought that lies behind several of the misguided attempts to
correct what some feminists view as economic injustice.

The functions that homemakers perform do not have, have not had,
and will not have a high economic value.  The reason for this has
little to do with what is "woman's work" and what is "man's
work", and everything to do with facts about modern life and
basic economic principle.

The facts are these: almost everyone can do what homemakers do.
Everyone who has lived on their own has had to keep themselves
fed, clothed, and sheltered and had to pay the bills, deal with
minor legal problems, keep alive the pets and plants, maintain
their home's appearance, and cope with the other minutae of daily
life.  This includes not just women, but almost all men as well.

Moreover, most adults (again men as well as women) have learned
to some degree how to change a diaper, comfort an infant, notice
illness or fever in children, and somehow to be with a child
without abusing the child nor becoming themselves unglued.  There
are many people who make mistakes with children, but this
includes people who are parents and child care professionals as
well as people who have only occasional child care experience.
(While we might desire exceptional parents for each child, we
also desire average people to have children!)

These are the facts.  The economic principle is this: any
function that can be performed by almost everyone and that is
willingly performed by many is basic labor, and cannot command
economic value much beyond the going rate for basic labor, which
in our day and time is tracked by the minimum wage.  This means
that in most markets the pay for doing laundry, waiting tables,
watching children, and domestic service will be about minimum
wage, give or take a half.  This has little to do with the fact
that these tasks are more often performed by women, and
everything to do with the supply of willing labor.  The same
prediction can be made about busboys, dishwashers, and office
gofers, even though these jobs are more commonly filled by men.

There is a lot of confusion about what an economic claim like the
above means.  There are some common misconceptions that are best
put to rest early.

First, stating the economic value of something is not the same as
stating its importance.  Economic value is a fact about
particular conditions, in the case of a wage, how many people can
do something, how willing they are to do it, and how much other
people want it done for them.  Importance can be placed in a
broader context.  The corporate lawyer who must choose between
finishing an urgent brief or attending her young infant will
recognize that the latter is more important.  But under most
conditions, she can arrange to have others do this for her when
she wants to work.  Caring for children is more important than
making legal briefs, but fewer people can do the latter and those
who need it are more willing to pay a lot to have others do it
for them.

Second, the economic predictions carry tacit assumptions about
the common case.  Some office gofers get paid more than others
because they are related to the boss.  Some waiters work at four
star restaurants and some people who care for children are
trained to handle special medical or educational problems.  But
these are not the common case to which the above prediction
applies.  When one changes the tacit assumptions, the prediction
no longer holds.

Third, wages (like other prices) can always be set artificially
low or high.  A large part of economics concerns the behavior of
markets when external forces bias what would otherwise be market
prices.  If wages are held low, there will be a shortage of
qualified applicants and those who remain are often
underqualified.  If wages are held high, there will be a surplus
of qualified applicants, and some workers that are qualified to
take more responsible positions will refuse promotion.  Managers
and employers who must make do under the rules will try to
substitute perks for low wages, and require more work and effort
to counter high wages.

Coincidentally, the same day the local paper carried the story
about homemakers going into the job market, the Wall Street
Journal had an article about Washington state's attempt to pay
government workers on a calculated scale of "comparable worth",
rather than allowing demand to meet supply.  The article
described some "unexpected" backlash from the program.  For jobs
whose wages were moved low, qualified workers moved on to other
employers and the state was unable to fill needed positions.  For
jobs whose wages were held high, there were long waiting lists of
applicants and workers were refusing promotions.

The Washington legislators are learning (as have their peers in
the Soviet Union) that intervention can create shortages and
surpluses, but cannot change the laws of economics.  Hopefully,
the feminists behind this legislation will learn that changing
the economic lot of women also requires changing what women do,
not just mandating a reevaluation of "women's work", a concept
that feminism had once wisely discarded.

-----
One final note: I am for comparable worth in the sense of paying
people the same rate for the *same* work.  The comparable worth
that the Washington state government instituted is something very
different.  This scheme tried to calculate proportional scales
for *different* jobs on the basis of amount of education and
training required, stress inherent to the work, and other
factors.  The problem is that these things do not determine
economic value; supply and demand do.  Whether the interjection
of command into the market is based on Marxist theory or
comparable worth ideals, it will always run aground the way
markets really work.

Russell