Equal Pay

[Fran]

I'd appreciate hearing people's thoughts on the following:

An Objectivist/Libertarian friend is the CEO of a small company. He told me that it is morally right to pay women employees less than men. His arguments for this are the following:

Women invariably go on to have children and when they do the employer has to pay for marternity leave and should therefore pay women a lower salary to cover this. (Unfortunately, I didn't ask him how much less he would pay), when I challenged this and said that in a free country employers wouldn't be forced to do this; his response was:

Even if you didn't have to pay maternity leave, women usually still have children and this means that in two years time or so a woman is going to leave to have a baby(s) and therefore you've got to find a replacement for her, which is a lot of hassle for the employer [what about the men who only stay at a company for two years - which is a common period of time to stay at a company before moving on? But I forgot to challenge him on this]. Therefore these interruptions to their career and the time they take off to care for their children when they are sick, means that they are of less value than a man and they should therefore be paid less accordingly.

When I challenged him on the above and said, okay what if I was to sign a contract to say that I don't want children and I'm not going to have any, his response was that women are more hassle to employ than men and therefore he'd rather not employ them [i'm not clear in what way they are more hassle - does he mean their monthly mood swings?].

I have to say I was so shocked that an Oist was coming out with this, that I didn't really challenge his argument properly; but I thought the whole point of Oism was that you judged each person as an individual, but he didn't seem to want to do this and said that he's morally just to pay women less, if he employs them at all.

It makes me mad to be paid less than a man for doing the same job. I also think that the more rules and regulations governments put in place to make it 'fairer' for women, the less employable women become.

Fran

[Aaron]

I can see the risk of childbearing making employers consider women a higher risk in an average, actuarial sense. Your idea of contracting not to have children would be the right approach in a free society for an individual to overcome that problem. Such a contract might have $x to be paid back if violated, similar to how starting bonuses typically have to be paid back if someone leaves a company within a year.

If he didn't see the reasonableness of such a contract in a rational society and government, then I'd say he was just being irrationally discriminatory. However, there is also a real concern now in that at least in the states, such a contract has little chance of being enforceable.

[Reidy]

Why do you bring this up in the Politics section? It's a question about employment policy. Objectivism's political message, briefly, is that most questions shouldn't be political, and this is a case in point. It's not a difficult question, either. Let him try it and see if he can attract and keep good people.

Peter