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Why Does Obama's White House Pay Women Less?
Topic Started: Oct 19 2012, 08:46 AM (584 Views)
Berton
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Why Does Obama's White House Pay Women Less?


The president touts equal pay for equal work but hasn't practiced what he preaches with the women he has employed — including a well-known staffer who complained of a hostile work environment.

It remains a mystery as to why equal pay for women was one of the questions elected by unofficial Team Obama debate coach Candy Crowley of CNN during the second presidential debate.

But it let President Obama launch into breathtaking hypocrisy regarding the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Lilly Ledbetter, which in Crowley's view ranked right up there with BenghaziGate as a pivotal issue, woke up one morning complaining that her male counterparts were getting paid more money for the same work and decided to sue for redress of this perceived grievance.

After she was told she had missed the statutory deadline, her case made it to the Supreme Court, which said too bad, but you missed the deadline.

So Congress passed the Fair Pay Act, which does more for lawyers than it does for women, merely extending the statute of limitations for pay-discrimination lawsuits from 180 days from the violation to 180 days after the last paycheck issued that was affected by that discrimination.

When Katherine Fenton asked Obama what he intended to do about "women making only 72% of what their male counterparts earn," the question was based on a false premise and a false statistic — one calculated by Diana Furchtgott-Roth, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, by comparing all male with all female workers, regardless of experience, productivity, number of hours put in or length of service.

When you factor these things in, Furchtgott-Roth says, women make about 95 cents to a man's dollar, which may explain why, since the Ledbetter Act was passed in January 2009, only 35 women have filed lawsuits under the new law.

The question, and Obama's response, were calculated to highlight the Democratic campaign theme that Republicans are waging a war on women because they don't think that having taxpayers provide free contraceptives to Georgetown coeds will help us beat China.

Never mind that by the questioner's standards, the White House is a hotbed of sexist discrimination.

According to a report published by the Washington Free Beacon in April, the 2011 annual report on White House staffers revealed that the median annual salary for female White House employees was 18% less than male employees — $60,000 compared with $71,000.

During the 2008 campaign, columnist Deroy Murdock wrote that female staffers in Obama's U.S. Senate office were also shortchanged. "Obama's average male employee earned $54,397," Murdock inferred from Senate salary records. But the future president's "30 female employees (earned) $45,152, on average."

Defining what constitutes "equal work" is subjective, and part of the difference above may be explained by the fact that only one of Sen. Obama's top five staffers was a woman and only seven among his top 20.

Which raises another question for the champion of women's rights.

Journalist Ron Suskind, author of "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington and the Education of a President," has a recorded interview with former White House communications director and Mao Tse-tung fan Anita Dunn in which she complained Obama's White House was a hostile work environment for women.

"I remember once I told Valerie (Jarrett) that, I said if it weren't for the president, this place would be in court for a hostile workplace," Dunn told Suskind. "Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women."

While President Obama champions women's rights to which Republicans are supposedly hostile, Lilly Ledbetter herself might have found his White House an unfair and hostile work environment where the boss needs to practice what he preaches.

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Neutral
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That would have been a great question for Romney to have asked.
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Thumper
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Well, wonder what the two Goombahs have decided?
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Berton
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I for one have decided that you have never grown out of your adolescence. I am sure you agree with me.


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Berton
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No one on the left wants to defend the President?


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Mountainrivers
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Are the jobs comparable and pay less or are they less important jobs? One would need to know things like that before criticizing.
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Pat
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I assume Obama and his chief of staff reviewed the budget for staff and divided out jobs and pay accordingly. You know, based on job title and responsibility. Are you guys suggesting a male aide is being paid more than a female aide? That does not match how the president approached equality. Suggesting otherwise implies he was lying during the last debate.

I winder why Crowley didn't dig into that one, being she is a woman and all. Another debate mystery.
Edited by Pat, Oct 19 2012, 10:42 PM.
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Brewster
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More Phony Outrage(TM) from the Right.

The President doesn't set the salaries for his staff. It's done by Congress.

Quote:
 
All positions at the White House are federal jobs whose salaries are determined by the Office of Personnel Management, not the President. Secondly, if any woman at the White House felt that her pay was unfair, because of the Lily Ledbetter act, she now has a recourse that was, up to 2009, unavailable. Trying to tie President Obama to federal salaries is a retarded strategy. Since Congress has the final say on federal salaries, let's put it to a vote in Congress. Then we can count the number of Republicans who will, without a doubt, vote it down.

LINK
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Berton
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MediaMatters :bounce: funnypost toot doglaugh
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Pat
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Brewster
Oct 19 2012, 11:08 PM
More Phony Outrage(TM) from the Right.

The President doesn't set the salaries for his staff. It's done by Congress.

Quote:
 
All positions at the White House are federal jobs whose salaries are determined by the Office of Personnel Management, not the President. Secondly, if any woman at the White House felt that her pay was unfair, because of the Lily Ledbetter act, she now has a recourse that was, up to 2009, unavailable. Trying to tie President Obama to federal salaries is a retarded strategy. Since Congress has the final say on federal salaries, let's put it to a vote in Congress. Then we can count the number of Republicans who will, without a doubt, vote it down.

LINK
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/President44/story?id=6693901&page=1#.UIFxNVGXDKd

I don't believe your link is true Brew. In this article, the president capped wages, if he had no control, then he could not have capped wages.
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