Adele ferguson

IT MAY NOT be fashionable to say so these days, says the Wall Street Journal, but three cheers for the Senate filibuster.

“This week the 60-vote requirement (to halt a filibuster and advance a bill) will once again help kill a nasty bit of legislating known as the Paycheck Fairness Act.”

It did just that the other day, the final vote 52-47.

Our own U.S. Sen. Patty Murray is in the front row of Democrats attempting to equalize pay between men and women. It’s brought up periodically because trial lawyers want it, says the Journal, since it is a recipe for a class action boom.

There already is a federal law that ensures equal pay for equal work and in this state a minimum wage requirement but I’m told we don’t have jurisdiction over fairness between men’s and women’s wages. Democrats claim women earn only 70 cents for every dollar earned by a man but that’s attributed to the fact that women gravitate to professions such as teachers and secretaries that are often not as highly paid as male dominated industries.

The Paycheck Fairness Act would rewrite labor law to require businesses to comply with a bunch of new regulations in which they would have to justify their pay decisions. It requires the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to collect data from employers about how they compensate on the basis of sex, race and national origin. This information would form the basis of class action suits where businesses would be treated as guilty until shown to be innocent and with no caps on damage awards.

CALLING IT “the trial lawyer doozy,” the Journal said the bill was a walking advertisement for gridlock that would hurt the economy for no other reason than to pay off Democratic donors in the tort bar. Trial lawyers are among top campaign contributors to the Ds. It’s so bad, says the Journal, that if the filibuster didn’t exist, someone would have to invent it to kill this bill.

Actually, equal pay for equal work kind of ties into the reason I oppose gay marriage, even so far as granting the same benefits for spouses of gays and lesbians.

As I recall, the reason heterosexual wives were given special benefits other than those available to single women was because they stayed home and took care of the kids. Families for the most part lived on one paycheck, that of the husband.

World War II changed all that when so many men went off to war and the women went to work, not only to provide for their families (didn’t an Army private get only $21 a month in those days?) but because they were needed in the workforce.

WHEN THE WAR was over and the men came home, many women didn’t want to go back to taking care of children, which caused problems when a woman held a job usually held by a man. Veterans were given preference status which caused some more problems with men who didn’t go off to war but felt they held down the home front.

I remember the complaints of veterans about women such as wives of naval shipyard shop masters and supervisors tucked into good paying jobs they didn’t want to give up.

When I first went to work for a newspaper, women not only were paid less than the men but veterans who were known to receive pensions for war injuries were paid less than the other men to make up for the income difference.

This wage discrimination bill is part of the D effort to claim the GOP makes war on women although Mitt Romney says he is for pay equity for women, just not the way this bill does it. It’s as big a mess as Obamacare.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa. 98340)