Thursday, October 20, 2011

Walker Jobs Agenda to Repeal Equal Pay Enforcement Act in Private Sector. Businesses need unequal pay "certainty."

Gov. Walker's special session to create market "certainty" where there never was any to begin with, continues its march, but this time into the private sector. Whatever happened to the "invisible hand of the markets" checks and balances?
Sen. Hanson Press Release: Republicans continued their push to repeal the rights of Wisconsin workers today as they worked to advance a bill that would repeal the state’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act to (deal with) the ongoing pay disparity between what women and men are paid for performing the same work.

Senator Hansen D-Green Bay, said “Only now they are taking their assault on workers’ rights to those who work in the private sector.”

This is what the Republicans found so repugnant and unfair: 
The purpose of the law was to provide a stronger enforcement mechanism for violations of pay and workplace discrimination by allowing victims to plead their case in the less costly state circuit system rather than having to try to get their cases heard by federal courts. Republican say repeal is needed to protect Wisconsin businesses from frivolous discrimination lawsuits. 

And like voter fraud, Republicans fantasize about an avalanche of frivolous lawsuits flooding the courts and baffling incompetent judges from deciding what’s frivolous and not. Is it a big problem? Apparently, it’s not even a small problem:
The problem is there are no frivolous lawsuits to defend against because so far no cases are known to have gone to circuit court.

That’s after two years this law has been in place. But the “free market” needs an extra amount of “certainty.” So big government Republicans are churning out regulations needed to remove the “checks and balances” part of the brutal free market system they claim works so well. 

It should be noted that allowing business off the hook, would also slow economic recovery:
Nationally, working families lose $200 billion per year because women are paid less than men for the same work.  Wisconsin families lose more than $4,000 per year due to unequal pay.  In fact, while women nationally earn approximately 77 cents on the dollar compared to men, here in Wisconsin women earn 75% of that earned by their male colleagues.

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