Millions of women will get pay raises over the next years, but countless others are in danger of losing their jobs.
[While the] bill may have motives in the finest traditions of gallantry, it actually is about as ungallant as a kick in the shins. [These costs arise] from the indisputable fact that women are more prone to housemaking and motherhood than men.
The enactment of any equal pay legislation will add hundreds of employees to an already inflated Federal payroll and hundreds of thousands of dollars to an already astronomical Federal budget.
To have any meaning at all, a comparison of wage rates must be based on the wages of employees doing at least the same kind of work. For example, if one includes the wages of both skilled and unskilled employees in determining the average rates for women and men, the sex having the greater number of skilled workers will obviously have the higher average wage rate. There are, of course, a greater number of skilled male employees than skilled female employees. Consequently, when average wage rates are compared without being limited to the type of work being performed, the comparison is not merely meaningless; it is totally misleading. The resultant differential between the average wage rates of women and men simply cannot properly be used to support an argument that Federal equal pay legislation is necessary.
The broadly and vaguely worded administrative and enforcement provisions of [the bill] would authorize extensive governmental intervention in labor-management relations far exceeding the purported evils at which this legislation is allegedly directed. Such provisions, moreover, effectively give the Secretary and his agents an unlimited license to destroy the wage structures which both management and labor have worked for years to develop….The exercise of such unlimited powers could not but grievously and irreparably injure labor management relations throughout the Nation.
[T]he inevitable effect of this legislation will be to create an artificial barrier on job opportunities for women. There will be a strong compulsion on employers to divide their jobs into women’s jobs and men’s jobs and to never hire a person of the opposite sex in those jobs just so they will not have the Department of Labor looking over their shoulders.
If my company were compelled to raise all of our female rates in this plant to the male rates in question, it would seriously jeopardize the competitive position of this plant with its competitors located in other states employing all females in these jobs.
[Consider] the possible impact of this bill upon efforts to equalize wages in plants employing mostly women and relatively few men. If there is a wage differential between men and women that cannot be justified under the restrictive standards of this bill and the wages of the male employees cannot be reduced, a plant could run into serious financial difficulty if it were forced to increase the pay of all female employees to the level of the few male members.
I assume that a typical goal of the proposed bill would be to eliminate [pay differentials]….if the bill did this it would eliminate thousands and even hundreds of thousands of job opportunities for women.
Proponents of Federal equal pay at times say that variations in State laws indicate a need for a Federal law which will promote uniformity. Such a contention is unsound. A certain amount of experimentation is desirable to find the type of law that works best. The efforts in the 22 States [with equal pay laws already on the books] amount, in effect, to laboratories of experiment….This opportunity for the 50 States to learn from one another is highly desirable. It would be forever lost once Federal legislation takes effect.
