This week on CounterSpin: Looking back at Equal Pay Day, April 2, it seems strange that when the subject is the fact that women continue to be paid less than men for the same work—and women of color still less—such a lot of the conversation is not about how we can fix the problem quickly and concretely, but about whether the numbers really say what they seem to; or whether maybe it’s not so bad; or women’s fault; or will, left alone, get better over time. We’ll talk about the persistent reality of the gender pay gap with Deborah Vagins, senior vice president for public policy and research at the American Association of University Women.
Transcript: ‘Women Take Home Less Money Than They’ve Rightfully Earned’
Also on the show: We’ve just passed the April 4 anniversary of the 1968 killing of Martin Luther King Jr., hounded for years, listeners will know, by the FBI, which sought to disrupt and discredit the powerful protest of King and other black activists with a program called COINTELPRO. What for many is a shameful episode in US history seems to be a source of inspiration for today’s FBI, whose fabrication of a category of domestic threat dubbed “Black Identity Extremism” seems to have eerily similar goals. We’ll talk with Nusrat Choudhury, deputy director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program, about efforts to expose and resist the FBI’s dangerous ideas.
Transcript: ‘The FBI Appears to Be Engaged in a Modern-Day Version of COINTELPRO’
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Russia in Africa.
I’m not sold on the pay gap still existing. Faults in data are listed right from the start… US Census Bureau stats say women receive about 80% the pay of men… The problem with this is that the Census Bureau defines “full time year round employment” as someone who works at least 35 per week. There is no adjustment made for the number of hours worked (men typically work more hours than women). Several other faults in the piece, but I’m tired of this myth. Do women take home less than men on average? Yes. Do women make less than men for identical work? No.
J Frank——welcome to the gig economy and the rise of the 1099 worker—where as employer and employee in one—–you get to pay both sides of the taxes! It’s not just a pay gap, but an actual JOB gap. Equal pay, equal work…? Sadly it depends on the company. This is NOT the American job world of 50 years ago, nor is it the world of stable rents either!
Quick search of “1099”, I guess this is a US tax thing, of being a contractor? Ok, but not sure what that’s about. Overall, women are in lower paid jobs, thus the lower wages. If we started calling it a “job gap” instead of a “pay gap” we might actually get somewhere. If I ran a company and could hire women to do the same work that men do, and as an employer I get a 20% discount on my wage costs, bring on the girl power! However I have come across very few women that want to join us in the oilfields for 12 hour shifts, all summer and all winter. If the government starts to force companies to hire certain minimum percentages of men or women, lets keep it fair and make sure the nursing and teaching professions play by the same rules.
What is the FBI against, again? Protesting police brutality? Does this mean the FBI is FOR police brutality? Especially concerning black people?
Seems one might have trouble coming to a different conclusion.
It seems to me Nusrat Choudhury should have said the FBI is a terrorist organization after stating that it had disseminated an intelligence assessment to 18,000 police departments highly trained to protect each other as if they were close family. Shoot first in order to protect your partner from harm and don’t hesitate and don’t answer any questions. Please ensure that the term reverse discrimination has no place in law. We will have a fair society when we simply insist that women, people with melanin and the differently abled are well represented in all the favorable categories and so called people of European dissent are proportionally represented in all the unfavorable categories. Until we do so we will remain a white settler terrorist nation/civilization under law enforcing poverty and evictions. Peace. Save the our planet from perpetual economic expansion worship.