7
Comparable Worth in a Restructuring Economy
Discourse and Counter-Discourse
Ellen Mutari and Deborah M. Figart
The U.S. economy of the 1980s and 1990s is in transition. While the basic contours of the market-based economic system remain unchanged, the rules of the game that seemed to apply during the postwar period are in flux. Among political economists, a number of frameworks have been proposed to analyze economic restructuring in industrialized countries: most prominently, social structures of accumulation (SSA) and regulation theory. These analyses focus on the institutional and technical conditions underpinning, and eventually undermining, long waves of accumulation. While political economists have devoted substantial attention to the political and economic institutional arrangements fostering long waves of accumulation, the linkages between gender relations and accumulation during specific economic regimes have been undertheorized. To the extent that gender is analyzed within this restructuring literature, women’s increased labor force participation as a demographic, supply phenomenon is analytically separated from structural changes within production. In contrast, Bakker (1996) advocates viewing “gender as an interactive category of analysis in a complete account of the transforming global order.” Thus, gender interacts with class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality in specific historical contexts (Bakker 1996, 8–9; see also Mitter 1986).
Politically, contemporary economic restructuring has been associated with the rise of conservative governments in the United States and other Western nations. Although taking different forms in different national contexts, the state’s revised mission has been “to subordinate social policy to the needs of labour market flexibility and/or to the constraints of international competition” (Jessop 1994, 24; see also Howell 1992). In the United States, this has taken the form of supply-side policies to cut spending on social programs, reduce taxes, and deregulate business. Throughout the 1980s, this delegitimation of the state in domestic affairs was accompanied by tremendous military expansion and the acceleration of cold war ideology (Bernstein 1994). Similarly, European governments, especially the United Kingdom, have pursued deregulation and privatization as a central policy objective, along with the dismantling of European welfare states (Howell 1992; Faux 1995a, 1995b). As articulated in Beware the U.S. Model, published by the Economic Policy Institute: “The choice is between the hard-edged Social Darwinism of Thatcher and Reagan and a softer version represented by the neoliberalism of Clinton and Delors. Scratch the surface of either strand of the U.S. version of the model and you find anemic job growth and plummeting wages for the majority of workers” (Faux 1995a, xi).
Viewing economic restructuring through the lens of gender analysis can redirect our attention to neglected dimensions of social and institutional transformation. First, feminist contributions to political economy have noted that the postwar economic order was constructed upon a specific set of gender relations. Specifically, the relative prosperity of white male workers in core industries rested on the family wage ideology and married white women’s unpaid household labor (McDowell 1991; Williams 1994; O’Hara 1995; Bakker 1996; Brodie 1996; Jenson 1996; Cameron 1996). Economic policy was predicated upon the hypothesized stability of this gender order, a nuclear family supported by a male breadwinner. Second, feminization of wage labor has been posited as a managerial response to declining profit margins (see, for example, Jenson, Hagen, and Reddy 1988; Bakker 1996). The dynamic tension between the family wage ideology and the process of feminization has implications for the future of the pay equity movement.
The postwar order has perpetuated the systematic undervaluation of work done by women and people of color. Pay equity activists assert that this undervaluation is reflected in market and organizational wages; the remedy is to pay jobs according to the skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions required rather than the gender or race of incumbents. The 1980s had begun as a period of optimism for pay equity advocates and a period of concern for antagonists. The favorable 1981 Supreme Court Decision in County of Washington, Oregon v. Gunther sparked a wave of pay equity litigation, initiatives, and activism (McCann 1994).1 Numerous public sector jurisdictions in the United States and Canada reformed their classification systems via feminist utilization of job evaluation, yet transmitting these models to private, profit-seeking sector employers proved more difficult.2 Subsequent court decisions were less auspicious, and pay equity slipped down the agenda of those labor unions without significant public sector membership.
In the United States, the organized opposition to pay equity has found sustenance in the emerging political economy of liberalization and deregulation. Business organizations, long opposed to comparable worth, find newly elected conservative politicians increasingly receptive to arguments against comparable worth and other labor market regulations. Pay equity opponents maintain that raising wages in female-dominated occupations would result in “economy-wide turmoil” (Rhoads 1993b, 38). By the end of the decade of the eighties, business interests, in the words of pay equity adversary Rhoads (1993b), “pretty much enjoyed a respite” from demands for pay equity as the women’s movement turned greater attention to reproductive freedom, family leave, sexual harassment, and other issues.
The focus of this chapter is the relationship between changes in the political economy and shifts in gender relations. This research was motivated by our interest in how to revive the pay equity movement in the United States, given the problems posed by contemporary economic and political transformations. The discourse against comparable worth reform is analyzed in order to reveal opponents’ assumptions about women’s work and women’s wages. Following the analytical approach of Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon (1994, 311) in examining welfare reform debates, “we seek to contextualize discursive shifts in relation to broad institutional and social-structural shifts, and we welcome normative political reflection.”
In the following section, we argue that contemporary economic restructuring cannot be understood without considering the gendered basis of managerial strategies for alleviating the crisis in profitability. These managerial strategies have consequences for the movement to improve women’s economic status, which we explore through discourse analysis in two sections. First, we focus on how the ideological commitment to labor market flexibility is used to discredit pay equity reform. Second, we contend that gender ideologies represent one potential site of contradiction for the conservative offensive. This cultural confusion about gender roles presents opportunities for alternative visions. As David Gordon (1994b, 302) notes, “The global economy is up for grabs, not locked in some new and immutable order.” Feminist, labor, and other progressive movements are challenging the gendered basis of economic restructuring by linking pay equity to a redefinition of gender roles and a broad living wage movement. The goal is new, shared prosperity, accessible to a diversity of family forms.
Economic Restructuring and Gender
Attempting to overcome spurious divisions between macroeconomic and microeconomic analysis, political economists have developed historically based accounts of the relationship between macroeconomic stability and the institutional organization of production. We find that these accounts, primarily developed under the rubric of the social structure of accumulation (SSA) and regulation approaches, provide a useful context for viewing stability and change in gender relations. Yet neither school provides a completely satisfactory account of contemporary restructuring, in part because of the gender-blindness of each analysis.3 Therefore, the discussion that follows is a broad synthesis of literature from both schools, focusing especially on the U.S. experience.4 This is followed by a presentation of some feminist contributions to the analysis of contemporary restructuring.
Gordon, Edwards, and Reich (1982), in their original formulation of SSA theory, suggest that each wave or regime is marked by three periods: (1) exploration (when stagnation prompts experimentation with alternative structural arrangements); (2) consolidation (when one set of institutional arrangements becomes hegemonic); and (3) decay (when a new period of prolonged stagnation or crisis develops). Because of its evocative imagery, we utilize the term Fordism, borrowed from the regulation school founded by Aglietta (1979), to describe the institutional bases of the postwar wave of accumulation. Fordism is typically defined as having two components: an economic regime founded on mass production for mass consumption and a political regime or mode of regulation founded on the Keynesian welfare state. Within the SSA framework, the parallel concepts are the (limited) capital–labor accord and the capital(ist)-citizen accord. U.S. economic hegemony, “Pax Americana,” which reduced intercapitalist rivalries, is a further dimension in SSA theory.
Depictions of the stability of the Fordist regime focus on the concept of a “virtuous circle” that enabled Keynesian policies to flourish in the United States during the postwar period. That is, growth in worker productivity and in employment went hand in hand, permitting increased consumption with stable prices. The key to this process was the domestic market for manufactured goods; if employers shared the benefits of increased productivity with workers in core industries—through wage increases, fiscal policy, or welfare state provisions—the resultant increase in demand would fuel profits (see Appelbaum 1995). Of course, this arrangement primarily bestowed the prosperity of the Pax Americana upon white males in core industries within manufacturing, although there was positive spillover for other groups (Albelda and Tilly 1994; Badgett and Williams 1994; O’Hara 1995). Economies enter periods of restructuring when sustained crises generate “major structural changes in the organization of work and the structure of labor markets” (Gordon, Edwards, and Reich 1982, 2). Under both the SSA and regulation frameworks, the period since the early 1970s is viewed as a period of relative stagnation among Western industrialized nations due to a mismatch between current institutional structures and the new phase of economic development (Bernstein and Adler 1994). Within the more materialist regulation theory these contradictions originated within the accumulation process itself, while SSA has taken a more eclectic approach to the institutional sources of collapse. Nevertheless, SSA theorists distinguish their analysis from neo/post-Keynesian un-derconsumptionist approaches by emphasizing that the crisis originated in class conflict, which generates a profit squeeze (see, for example, Weisskopf 1994).5 Both theories agree that globalization is central to contemporary economic restructuring, although they disagree as to whether globalization is the cause of or the cure for economic insecurity.6
Feminists have drawn attention to the existence of a stable, but not immutable, gender order that impacts upon macroeconomic stability (see Bruegel and Perrons 1995). One pillar of the gender order is the family wage. Though its roots can be traced to nineteenth-century industrialization, the family wage was most extensively institutionalized during the postwar period: “Within this paradigm, adult men were seen as the primary workers, single or otherwise husbandless women and young people comprised a secondary labour force, and women were expected to withdraw from the paid labour force upon marriage” (Cameron 1996, 55). This hegemonic system of gender relations during the postwar period has been extensively critiqued in early writings by feminist economists and sociologists; however, as McDowell (1991) attests, many feminist analyses do not recognize the historical contingency of this system.
While much of the postwar economic expansion was founded upon industrial sectors where traditionally male, unionized jobs earning a so-called family wage predominated, economic restructuring has placed feminized sectors at the core of postindustrial economies. Standing (1989) introduced the concept of “global feminization through flexible labor,” presenting a unified analysis of trends in both developing and industrialized countries. Feminization is the direct result of employer strategy to decrease wages and increase control over external and internal labor markets. Mitter (1986) emphasizes that feminization strategies rely on women’s marginalization within the labor movement as well as gendered assumptions regarding women’s docility and domesticity.7
On an empirical level, feminization refers to women’s rising share of the labor force brought about by their increased labor force participation along with male workers’ displacement from manufacturing jobs. In a cross-country study, Ça atay and Özler (1995) find that women’s share of the labor force exhibits a U-shaped pattern over the course of development; the rising portion of the pattern has been intensified by contemporary macroeconomic policies and export-oriented growth. Although the 1920s mark the historical turning point in U.S. women’s labor force participation rates, as white married women increased their labor force attachment, this process intensified during the 1970s and 1980s (Kessler-Harris 1982; Goldin 1990).
Standing defines feminization broadly, encompassing structural changes in employment as well as quantitative changes in employment shares by gender. His global process of feminization entails three aspects: (1) direct substitution of women for men within jobs; (2) the expansion of traditionally female-intensive employment sectors; and (3) the expansion of forms of employment associated with women, such as part-time, temporary/contingent, and informal work (see also Jenson, Hagen, and Reddy 1988; Bakker 1996; Jenson 1996). Standing emphasizes that deregulation and flexible employment strategies foster “the types of work, labor relations, income, and insecurity associated with ‘women’s work’” (1077). Because they do not have the characteristics of male breadwinner jobs, these jobs are gendered female. Thus, Armstrong (1996) refers to the process of feminization as a harmonizing down since men’s and women’s employment prospects are increasingly similar (see also McDowell 1991).
Feminization, along with deindustrialization, has undermined the masculine ideal of the male breadwinner without establishing a clear replacement. Fiona Williams (1994, 57–58) argues that such shifts in gender relations should not be viewed as a passive outcome of economic change, but the result of women’s own agency and struggles over gender relations. Critiquing standard accounts of economic restructuring, she notes, “rarely is the power of explanation or the power of agency granted to gender, ‘race’ or any social relation other than class” (57). The emergence of new concepts of masculinity and femininity is a contentious terrain with an indeterminate outcome that feminists can hope to influence. The comparable worth movement, which attempts to extend the family wage to traditionally female jobs, can be viewed as one dimension of such efforts to develop a new gender order. Therefore, it is illuminating to analyze the economic and cultural arguments raised in opposition to such efforts.
Pay Equity and Flexibility
As the hegemony of Keynesian demand-oriented theory among economists and policymakers diminished, a rejuvenation of laissez-faire social Darwinism seeped into this intellectual vacuum. The market once again became the “central category of economic discourse” (Block 1990, 46; see also Faux 1995a). The word most closely associated with the reassertion of the market and optimistic visions of the postindustrial economy is flexibility, which is ideologically linked to the concept of competitiveness in an era of heightened international competition. If the hallmark of the Fordist era was mass production and consumption, the emerging era has been labeled a period of flexible accumulation (Brown 1991, 1091; see also Harvey 1991). The term flexibility is used by different authors to signify various aspects of institutional arrangements (see McDowell 1991; Gilbert, Burrows, and Poliert 1992). Our focus is on flexibility in employment relations rather than flexible specialization as indicated by product differentiation.
Labor market flexibility has been depicted as a crucial dimension of this process in order to permit firms to adapt to changing markets. Public policy was redirected to increase flexibility and eliminate rigidities so as to facilitate the smooth operation of markets, especially labor markets. “Increasingly, public debate has come to hinge, not on what kind of society we are or want to be, but on what the needs of the economy are. Hence, a broad range of social policies are now debated almost entirely in terms of how they fit in with the imperatives of the market” (Block 1990, 3). Sam Rosenberg (1991) contends that the drive for labor market flexibility takes three forms: wage flexibility, employment or numerical flexibility, and functional flexibility. The first two reassert the central role of supply and demand forces in external labor markets, signaling a return to classical notions of free market equilibrium. Greater wage flexibility is pursued through labor market deregulation, such as implicitly or explicitly lowering minimum wage standards, and through concession bargaining. Employers’ increased use of part-time, temporary, and contingent workers, as well as subcontractors and homeworkers, is part of their strategies to increase employment flexibility. Functional flexibility focuses on introducing flexibility within internal labor markets. This internal flexibility reduces the traditional power of workers in unionized, core sectors through flexible job descriptions and assignments. Functional flexibility may also be accompanied by a reduction in job mobility and union-developed career ladders within firms (see Standing 1989).
Gender adds a new perspective on this analysis of flexibility. Each of these three forms of flexibility are gendered. Wage flexibility undermines the family wage for male workers; more and more jobs pay “a woman’s wage” (see Kessler-Harris 1990). Employment flexibility is frequently accomplished by increased use of part-time and temporary workers, largely women. Internal flexibility transforms working conditions in male-dominated, core industries to resemble women’s “secondary” employment—vague job descriptions with few prospects for promotion.
Brodsky (1994) traces the shift in the meaning of labor market flexibility as advocated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) over the past thirty years. During the 1980s, Europe’s relatively higher unemployment rates (“Eurosclerosis”) were used by the OECD as a basis for positing the United States as a model of labor market flexibility; deregulation to promote flexibility in external labor markets was the central policy objective, along with dismantling of European welfare states.8 As the U.S. economy became increasingly troubled in the early 1990s, new strategies for economic restructuring were promoted by the OECD and others. Flexibility for the 1990s was redirected toward internal, or functional, flexibility, although attacks on social welfare programs and labor market regulations continued.
This gendered basis of economic restructuring has made pay equity directly contradictory to contemporary accumulation strategies based on external and internal flexibility. Popular discourse against pay equity, as expressed in the United States by business lobby organizations, their funded researchers, and Republican officials, warns of the dangers of tampering with labor markets (see Greenwood 1984; Steinberg 1986; Bergmann 1989a; and Peterson 1992). As articulated in a publication sponsored by the Cato Institute, a libertarian public policy research organization in Washington, D.C.: “Most proponents of comparable worth argue that it is not an alternative to the market, that it is like other correctives to the market that have been instituted by government in recent years. I contend that this is false. Comparable worth … cannot be grafted onto the market. Rather, the market and comparable worth emanate from two entirely different normative assumptions about individual action” (Paul 1989, 116).
Not surprisingly, the cornerstone of opponents’ arguments has centered on flexible wage-setting. Specifically, pay equity is argued to interfere with the ability of market forces to adapt and respond to changing economic conditions: “What has characterized capitalist economies since the Industrial Revolution is precisely the options that workers have, the fluidity of labor markets, and the ever-changing possibilities the market creates” (Paul 1989, 113). Steven Rhoads, a professor of government who writes for both academic and business audiences, sums up this position: “Well-functioning market economies use rising wages to ameliorate shortages of labor in an occupation or at a particular location, and use static or falling wages to reduce surpluses by encouraging worker exit and discouraging entry. Comparable worth does not allow this flexibility” (Rhoads 1993b, 40).
This defense of the market mechanism rests on the explicit assumptions of value theory in neoclassical economics. Comparable worth advocates are accused of the economic heresy of a “fair” or “just” price—a theory held by classical economists such as Adam Smith, but abandoned by neoclassical theorists (see Hildebrand 1980, 83; O’Neill 1984a, 177–78; Thomas 1985, 2; U.S. Office of Personnel Management 1987, 37).9 For example: “Flawed from its inception in the notion that jobs have objective value, comparable worth compounds its initial error by calling for job evaluations freed from market constraints. This sets the supporters adrift in a sea of subjectivity. Since they cannot eliminate values, they seek to replace the values of millions of free individuals expressed every day in the marketplace with the values of job-evaluation experts imbued with feminist ideology. And a misguided feminism at that” (Paul 1989, 57).
Although this free-market argument has a long history, it has gained new credibility with the return to laissez-faire. Advocacy of labor market flexibility rests on the assertion that government regulation of wages introduces rigidities. Conservative discourse utilizes antistate rhetoric. Pay equity and other forms of employment regulation are depicted as barriers to competitiveness. Despite the focus of the pay equity movement on a decentralized strategy implemented at the establishment level, opponents testifying before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and at a conference sponsored by Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum Education and Legal Defense Fund continually raised the specter of centrally administered wage boards, saying, for example: “Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the comparable worth theory is that it would establish a governmental agency as the final arbiter of wages” (Northrup 1984, 98); and “In spite of assurances to the contrary, a central system of government-dictated wages appears to be the inescapable long-range consequence of the currently advocated step process” (Berger 1984, 70).
Reflecting the “consensus” that an unregulated economy represents a model of external flexibility, the relative success of the United States has been trumpeted. In the following passage, Rhoads makes a broadscale comparison between the United States and Australia: “The economic costs of comparable worth are likely to be enormous. Since Australia began its centralized wage-fixing system in 1913, its per-capita income has fallen from highest in the world to 13th, 30 percent behind the United States. Many economists think Australia’s inflexible wage system explains much of this deterioration, and all the major Australian political parties now favor more decentralized, market-driven wages as a way to improve efficiency and growth” (Rhoads 1993b, 41). Thus, the cost of pay equity reform, increasingly depicted as a threat to profitability, is receiving increased attention (Rhoads 1993a, 1993c).
Yet the emergence of supply-side economic theory has added a new dimension to the neoclassical defense of markets. George Hildebrand, writing for the Equal Employment Advisory Council (the Orwellian-named, employer-funded, antiregulation organization), reflects the supply-side concern with regulation’s impact on productivity:
Turning to the broader issues, what we actually face, as a latent and so far unrecognized element in this new proposal for wage regulation, is yet another large-scale regulatory intervention into the private sector…. In addition, it has at last begun to be recognized that the overall productivity of labor and capital has been slowing in its annual gains for over a decade, and now, ominously, has turned negative. Unless this tendency can be turned around quickly and strongly, there can be no hope for the continued broad improvements in real per capita incomes, including real wages, that we have enjoyed for so long. In the presence of this very real threat to national well-being, therefore, productivity rather than controversial notions of wage justice should dominate our attention. (Hildebrand 1980, 104–7)
Economist Wendy Lee Gramm (1994) presents supply-side policies as a feminist agenda, maintaining that women share in the losses wrought by pay equity and other forms of government regulation: “Women’s advocates should support free and competitive international markets, lower capital-gains taxes, lower income taxes and fewer burdensome government regulations. And they should oppose government-imposed solutions like quotas, comparable worth, or socialized medicine, because these measures promote economic inefficiency, increase employer costs and decrease the demand for labor.”
The pursuit of productivity underlies the newer calls for functional, in addition to external, flexibility. However, functional flexibility presents a moving target for the technocratic versions of pay equity strategy, which were most successful in the public sector during the 1980s; if workers are not assigned fixed responsibilities, formal job evaluation becomes more difficult (Bakker 1991). In a restructuring political economy, with the state under attack as diverting resources from the market, and corporate strategies emphasizing lower labor costs and functional flexibility, pay equity strategies may themselves need “restructuring.” Pay equity, broadly understood as addressing inequities in low-wage jobs and occupations and as drawing upon the notion of the undervaluation of women’s work, can be pursued through a variety of means. These alternative mobilizations are discussed further in the final section of this chapter.
Pay Equity and Gender Relations
The rise and fall of family wage ideology illustrates the institution and unraveling of Fordism’s gender order. Focusing on the development of a family wage policy at Ford Motor Company, Martha May (1982) suggests that the family wage ideology contained two elements. The relationship between these two components is crucial to understanding contentious debates over the historical meaning of political and economic struggles to achieve the family wage. First, the family wage represented a demand for subsistence and survival for working-class families. Second, it was based on and reinforced emerging social relations that posited separate spheres for men and women. Thus, the controversy over the family wage has centered on whether it was a unified working-class strategy or a means by which male workers gained privileges at the expense of working women while capitalists maintained women’s low wages. It has been a lightening rod for debates over the relationship between class and gender struggles.
Rather than reflecting the primacy of class, gender, or race conflict, the family wage embodies the complexity and interaction of these social forces in both production and reproduction. Sonya Rose (1992) argues that the rhetoric of the family wage was founded on definitions of masculinity as wage-earning and femininity as homemaking, which indicate that gender was fundamental to the construction of class relations in the nineteenth century. Her analysis emphasizes that the family wage operated primarily at the level of ideology and was achievable for only a small segment of the working class. May (1982) concurs, noting that many working-class families, especially African American families, were excluded from this idealized family structure. Thus, even in times of relative stability, several models of gender relations coexist within the overall system, differentiated by race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, or age.
Contemporary feminization illustrates the complexity of cultural interactions between gender, class, and race. Because the gender order was unevenly developed and contained elements that disempowered women, the relationship of women and people of color to the “loss” of postwar prosperity is more ambiguous than that of men. Viewed optimistically, contemporary restructuring has led to the demise of the ideology of women’s domesticity and working women’s increased economic autonomy (Hartmann 1987; Kessler-Harris and Sacks 1987). Yet it has also intensified the hardships faced by women of color, whose communities have been devastated by urban decay and cutbacks in social services (Zinn 1987). Badgett and Williams (1994) find empirical evidence that white women working outside the home, more than black workers of either gender, are improving their employment status as a result of economic restructuring. McDowell (1991) emphasizes the intensification of class differences between women reaping the gains of lower barriers to managerial and professional jobs and working-class women in part-time, contingent, and undervalued jobs.
The discourse against pay equity also exemplifies the contemporary tension and confusion over gender relations in transition. On the one hand, a gender order of male breadwinner, female homemaker is assumed. Based on this presumption, opponents put forth the traditional argument that women choose female-dominated jobs in order to balance work and family responsibilities. At congressional hearings on pay equity for federal workers, Phyllis Schlafly, president of Eagle Forum, summarizes this position:
The pay gap between men and women is not due to discrimination. It is due primarily to the fact that men and women get married…. Most married men are motivated to work harder in the labor force to provide for their families. Most married women are motivated to spend more effort on the daily care and nurturing of their children. That’s why most women choose occupations which allow repeated entry and exit from the labor force, part-time work or shorter hours, transfer to another city in order to accompany their husbands, and which have pleasanter and less risky work environments. Comparable worth is an attempt to force employers, taxpayers and consumers to pay women as though they had not made those career choices. (Schlafly 1985, 267)
In this framework, women’s lower wages are explained by “crowding” (an excess supply of workers driving down wages) and intermittent labor force participation, which generates less on-the-job experience: “[F]amily commitments and a variety of feminine traits affecting job preference may always leave women somewhat less mobile in the labor market than men” (Rabkin 1984, 190).
Some writers attempt to display their neutrality by not overtly advocating this gender division of labor. Instead, the division of labor is portrayed as a social, but not economic, question: “Regardless of one’s views of these traditions, they are factors that must be considered separate from discrimination by employers. For example, women as a group, to a greater extent than men, have traditionally assumed the primary role for child-raising responsibilities” (Williams and Kessler 1984, 20). In a book entitled Equal Pay for UNequal Work published by the Eagle Forum, one commentator takes the most extreme position, affirming that “the main trouble with the feminist diagnosis of the economic division of labor is its disregard of biology” (Levin 1984, 130). He continues, “Any cultural universal as the sexual division of labor suggests a non-social, biological cause, and indeed it is as certain as anything in science can be that men and women do differ in the abilities and, more importantly, the motivations, they bring to paid labor and everything else.” On the other hand, some opponents argue that younger women’s priorities are changing and they are increasingly breaking down barriers to higher-paid occupations (O’Neill 1984a, 1994; Brody 1984; Roback 1986; Paul 1989). At the same hearings in which Schlafly defends the existence of dual spheres, June O’Neill maintains that social roles are changing. After citing statistics on women’s rising share of medical degrees, she proclaims: “These changes are taking place because of fundamental changes in women’s role in the economy and in the family—changes that themselves reflect a response to rising wage rates as well as changing social attitudes. Pay set according to comparable worth would distort wage signals, inducing inappropriate supply responses and unemployment. … If women have been discouraged by society or barred by employers from entering certain occupations, the appropriate response is to remove the barriers, not try to repeal supply and demand” (O’Neill 1984b, 264). Jennifer Roback, a self-described “skeptical feminist,” argues that comparable worth inappropriately glorifies stereotypical female jobs rather than encouraging women to enter nontraditional fields. She declares “It is similar to arguing that blacks are segregated into shining shoes and scrubbing floors, so that raising the wages of those jobs is the only fair thing to do” (1986, 43).10
There is a cognitive dissonance to these arguments, as conservatives grapple with the impact of feminization and feminism on gender relations. This dualistic analysis of women’s roles—the continuance of the full-time homemaker versus the emergence of a new generation of married career women—enables pay equity’s antagonists to pit groups of women against each other. Asserting that the labor market merely reflects women’s supply-side decisions to value family over career, some opponents claim pay equity harms married women and the structure of the nuclear family: “Thus, the income redistributed by comparable worth theory would flow mainly to single women and to families without young children. … We doubt that a convincing case could be made that such a redistribution of real income would be beneficial to the nation as a whole” (Nelson, Opton, and Wilson 1980, 399).
The explicit assumptions behind this analysis are that married women do not work and that single women do not need to earn a breadwinner’s wage. However, there is no clear consensus on which women are harmed by pay equity. Paul (1989, 123) asserts that pay equity harms women entrepreneurs: “One group of women who would be harmed if comparable worth artificially inflated entry-level salaries are women entrepreneurs, especially those in the process of creating new businesses, since these start-up companies are quite labor intensive.” In fact, Paul finds few women who would actually benefit from pay equity, echoing the common pronouncement that raising the legislated minimum wage would create unemployment: “However, to women reentering the labor market after a marriage has broken up, to women just out of high school, to newly arrived immigrants, and to those with little skill, the freedom to take the clerical, factory, and sales jobs is the difference between having a chance to better themselves or being condemned to dependency. Comparable worth, by artificially raising the wages of such jobs, would restrict the number of such positions and make the lot of the poorest and least skilled women that much worse” (Paul 1989, 124).
These attempts to fragment women’s interests are indicative of a broader right-wing strategy in the United States. Specific groups of women have been direct targets of conservative political rhetoric, fueling race and class divisions between women. For example, in discussions of welfare reform, women on welfare are portrayed with racist imagery. “Career women” in managerial and professional jobs are demonized as sexual predators and/or negligent mothers in popular culture. Much of this rhetoric provides misty reminiscences about the postwar gender order. The irony of this cultural onslaught for the pay equity movement is the relative invisibility of working-class women and the reality of their work and family lives in this discourse. In the final section of this chapter, we argue that progressives need to seize upon this vacuum in proposing alternative strategies.
Strategic Implications of Feminization
Jane Jenson (1996, 92) asserts that “it is only by understanding the extent to which a new set of gendered employment relations is at the heart of the restructured economies that we can begin to comprehend the restructuring, as well as any space available within it for generating equality.” Global feminization in interaction with an active feminist movement has begun to unravel one of the institutional pillars of postwar accumulation—the family wage supporting the ideology of separate spheres. Flexible employment, with wages and working conditions that are culturally gendered as female, is being promulgated as the solution to restoring profitability. Unfortunately, the prospect offered is jobs that permit neither women nor men of the working class the possibility of supporting families on an individual’s earnings. The challenge is to resist these aspects of economic restructuring without hearkening back to the “good old days” of postwar gender relations and the male breadwinner ideology. Pay equity attempts to extend the concept of a breadwinner wage to female-dominated occupations just as the family wage for men is disappearing, undermined by the deindustrialization process. Unfortunately, this has generated resistance to pay equity among potential allies (see Figart and Kahn 1997). Therefore, it is still a low priority on many progressive agendas. Progressive strategies need to be reformulated to embrace gender and race analysis. Further, economic issues need to be central to revitalizing a feminist movement in the United States that has been preoccupied with the single-issue politics of reproductive freedom, as articulated by Burk and Hartmann (1996).
In a sense, activists need to present a “counter-discourse,” as part of a social movement for economic security. The discourse of pay equity’s conservative opponents has illustrated many of the cultural preoccupations of U.S. society in the 1990s. The relative weakness of the left has led to a revival of promarket ideology in the wake of Keynesian economics and the welfare state. Further, a cultural confusion over gender emanates from the right. We believe the latter represents an opportunity for feminist and other social activists.
With the recent change in leadership in the U.S. labor movement, the prospects for bringing marginalized workers into the heart of a new labor strategy has improved. The new language of a “living wage” is evidence of emerging efforts to raise wages, including those for predominantly female and disproportionately minority jobs and occupations. Three developments can be construed as aspects of this living wage movement. First, raising the legislated minimum wage has become a priority issue at federal and state levels. Advocates point out that the real value of the minimum wage has declined to well below the level needed to support a family (Geoghegan 1996; Rubin et al. 1996). Since six out of every ten minimum wage workers are women, this policy is one way of addressing women’s overrepresentation in low-paid jobs (Figart and Lapidus 1995). Second, progressive critiques of welfare reform mandating paid employment argue that work paying poverty-level wages cannot substitute for public assistance; antipoverty policies must include labor market reforms such as pay equity and increasing the minimum wage (Rutten 1991; Figart and Lapidus 1995; Kuttner 1995). Finally, over thirty municipalities have considered legislation requiring companies receiving “corporate welfare” (tax rebates, supplier contracts, etc.) to pay workers a “living wage” well above the federal minimum. Such initiatives have already been adopted by Baltimore (Maryland) and Santa Clara County (California) (Garza 1996; Tyson 1996; Uchitelle 1996). These efforts de-gender the concept of the family wage, and the movement becomes one to ensure that all workers can support their families, embracing a diversity of family forms. Decentralized, creative, grassroots approaches in a broad-based pay equity movement can further efforts to contest the gendered labor markets at the core of economic restructuring.
Notes
1. This U.S. Supreme Court decision upheld a lower court ruling that plaintiffs could sue for wage discrimination even if men and women were in similar, but not identical, jobs. The case was based on a discrimination lawsuit filed by female guards in the county jail whose responsibilities varied slightly from those of male guards. The case was pursued under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
2. Job evaluation, a formal procedure for hierarchically ordering a set of jobs according to their worth within or value to an organization, is frequently used to ascertain whether jobs of comparable value are paid equitably. Both traditional and comparable worth job evaluation involve external wage comparisons with the labor market and internal wage comparisons within the organization.
3. For example, Albelda and Tilly (1994) point out that SSA’s capital–labor accord periodizes the historical development of labor markets based on the experience of white male workers. Gordon, Edwards, and Reich (1982) view the postwar period as the most recent of three overlapping social structures of accumulation in U.S. economic history. Focusing on labor market structures, they identify a period of initial proletarianization (1820s–1890s); a period when conditions for wage workers became increasingly homogeneous as mechanization lowered the skill component of jobs (1870s through World War II); and a period of labor market segmentation from the 1920s to the present. Thus, SSA views the postwar period as marked by a shift from homogenization of labor to labor market segmentation, yet Albelda and Tilly note that labor markets were segmented by gender and race in the nineteenth century (see also Cherry 1991; Wagman 1995).
4. Some of the sources utilized for this section include Aglietta (1979); Gordon, Edwards, and Reich (1982); Bernstein and Adler (1994); Kotz, McDonough, and Reich (1994); Loader and Burrows (1994). Despite the broad similarities between the two frameworks, the causes of prosperity and stagnation, the nature of the relationship between economic and other social institutions, as well the exact dating of the recent decline vary among authors and countries under study. For comparison of key themes in the two schools, see Kotz (1994a) and O’Hara (1994). In this summary, we are focusing on critical approaches to the post-Fordist era; therefore we do not consider more optimistic work on flexible specialization such as Piore and Sabel (1984).
5. Underconsumptionist theories argue that economic crises develop when workers’ real wages decline and they are unable to purchase goods and services, thus capitalists are not able to realize a profit from their investments. Profit squeeze theories attribute crises to economic expansion, which drives wages up, cutting into capitalists’ profits.
6. For contrasting positions on globalization as cause or symptom, see Faux (1995b) and D. Gordon (1994b).
7. Analyses of global feminization are sometimes reproached for presupposing a uniform trajectory to contemporary economic restructuring. Critics argue that this formulation oversimplifies the diversity of women’s experiences in specific national, regional, and cultural contexts (Cohen 1994). Yet Bakker (1996) argues that feminization indeed captures an important, though not inevitable, dimension of contemporary restructuring.
8. This is supported by Howell’s (1992) case study of France during this period.
9. Smith, like Marx, believed that commodities had a “natural” price based upon the direct and indirect labor embedded in them during production; he believed market prices fluctuated around this price according to supply and demand.
10. In fact, raising the wages of such minority-concentrated jobs is entirely consistent with the pay equity mandate that jobs be remunerated according to their skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions. According to the theory of compensating differentials, shining shoes and scrubbing floors should gamer higher wages due, in part, to the unpleasant working conditions and physical effort required for each job.