A few facts for poor, slow-witted Harriet Harman, now complaining that women in part-time work earn less than men in full-time work. I wonder why that might be?
It has been illegal for 38 years to pay a woman, simply because she is a woman, less than a man for doing the same job.
Men and women working part-time earn the same hourly rate, as do men and women working full-time and aged under 40. And single, widowed or divorced men and women working full-time earn the same hourly rate.
The entire "pay gap" is down to the differential pay among those aged 30 and upwards (especially over 40), and among older couples (married or cohabiting), and it is strongly related to the number of dependent children (eight per cent for none, thirty-five per cent for four or more).
The data for younger and single people shows that women earn the same as men. The gaps are due to women tending to work part-time, and to women in couples earning less than men in couples. Both are plausibly explained by child care, career breaks, choices to spend more time home-making, and so forth, the last a thoroughly good thing to anyone who knows the difference between price and value.
So, not Harman, then. Nor her old friend at the old National Council of Civil Liberties back when it was hand in glove with the Paedophile Information Exchange, Patricia Hewitt, who while a Minister talked about the "problem" of mothers who didn't go out to work.
Still, Harman is only following where David Cameron has led. His A-list reserved the best seats for women and ethnic minorities (and card-carrying members of the Labour Party, who had never left the party that they had only joined because of Blair). He is on record that "at least a third of my Cabinet will be women". And he has gerrymandered the selection of Tory candidates for the European Parliament, first to ensure the re-selection of sitting Europhile MEP, and then to ensure the selection of women.
I have pointed out before how closely the achingly high-born George Osborne and the achingly high-born Harriet Harman resemble each other. But David Cameron's cousin is Ferdinand Mount, whose mother's brother was Lord Longford, Harman's uncle. Are Cameron and Harman by any chance related? I think we should be told.
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New Labour haven't the balls to introduce the most effective way of ensuring that companies abide by the law - compulsory pay auditing. Or better still, "open the books" - that old demand of the labour movement.
ReplyDeleteAs for Camoron, he's related to the Queen. I suppose that we're all related to one another - if you go back far enough.
Indeed we are.
ReplyDeleteI'd be surprised if a good Bullingdon Boy would admit to being related to the Royal Family (Cameron has never done so, although he certainly is), since the real old aristocracy looks down on them as parvenues, immigrants and nouveux riches.
That, and not any "People's Princess" drivel, was the real reason for the friction with Diana. Which leads one to the fact that the current President of the Bullingdon Club is Diana's nephew.
I've never been sure about "open the books". But I would make it illegal for any company to pay any employee more than ten times what it pays any other employee, with the whole public sector functioning as a single entity for this purpose, and with MPs' salaries fixed by statute at the median in the public sector, itself fixed by statute at the median in the private sector.