‘Not the Conservative party’ as Peter Hitchens calls it continues its left wing agenda. It is difficult to regret leaving them. Whoever thought David Cameron was a Conservative surely must have been jolted into reality again recently by his espousal of ‘equality’ in the workplace. Now firms with more than 250 employees must pubIish their rates of pay for men and women to deal with the gender pay gap! As Peter Hitchens himself hinted the other day on ‘Any Questions,’ some of David Cameron’s utterances these days would be quite at home in a Trotskyite pamphlet. It is ironic that the Conservatives refused to bring in this legislation in the coalition years under pressure from the Liberal Democrats, but now they have a majority government they bring it in!
Exactly what business has the government in forcing employers to publish such information? What happened to freedom? Freedom is messy, it allows for extremes which should only be interfered with for a very good reason. Is that reason that everyone has to know what everybody else is being paid so that no ‘unfairness’ is taking place? Every law made takes away a little bit more freedom. My understanding of business is that an employer is free to pay people what he wants at a rate that suits his requirements. Why should the government force him to tell everybody private details of how he runs his company?
Now there is of course an issue if men are consistently paid more than women for exactly the same job with the same responsibilities. There is balance here, so some worker protections are called for. But to over legislate like this? To force companies to make pay details public? How much extra onerous costs will this impose on firms? Balance is often the key. Extremes are wrong, so absolutely no legislation is wrong, but so is over legislating. Trouble is, the country has moved so far to the left that what was considered extreme before has now become ‘normal.’ We have become accepting of a culture of excessive external control on our activities.
Now if a firm wants to indulge in such a practice then let them. If everyone is happy to see how everybody else is being paid, including the managers and executives, then go for it. On the Money Programme on Radio 4 this last month was a firm indulging in this very practice and it seemed to work quite well in that company. But to mandate such policies from Prime Ministerial level?
The government would have a bit of a problem with that parable in the New Testament where the landowner goes out in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard, although admittedly it wasn’t a gender pay gap issue. However it does touch a few current equality/anti discrimination nerves!
In the parable the employer takes on workers at the beginning of the day who work for him throughout the day for an accepted and agreed wage rate. He takes on further workers later in the morning and agrees to pay them ‘whatever is right.’ Then at noon and again at three in the afternoon the employer finds further workers. And again at 5pm in the afternoon. Then at the end of the day these guys who are hired at nearly the end of the working day are paid by the employer the same money as the guys who have worked for him all day – one denarius! Well how is that fair?
Some government equality duty would force that pesky employer to be a good boy and pay a fair wage for hours worked. Everyone’s wage would be publicised by the firm under government edict so that people could see just how unfair that employer was in paying the same wage to everybody regardless of the number of hours. No doubt the workers hired for the whole day would take the employer to a tribunal for ‘underpaying’ them.
Well it might sound unfair but doesn’t an employer have the right to spend his money in the way he desires? It’s his money. Everyone agreed to be paid a specific wage rate. It is no business of government to tell a businessman/woman how he/she spends his/her money. It is very telling what the landowner tells the complainers, ‘Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’
Of course this parable has a spiritual interpretation, and a theologian would tell you it illustrates Gods grace towards everyone, no matter how bad or sinful they are. There is another way of looking at this. How many of those guys who got work later had been waiting around all day looking for job security? They would be worried, anxious, afraid about how they would provide for their families, spending the day not knowing whether or not anyone would take them on, perhaps waiting through the heat of the day for potential work. Then an employer comes along and gives them job security for the day so they don’t have to worry about meeting their needs. A generous spirit will be glad that this poor worker has had his needs met for the whole day by being paid a generous wage.
We are so fixated by notions of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ that we have lost sight of what freedom means. If a person is unhappy with their working conditions then in a free society you can still make representation and bargain for a better deal or go somewhere else. Words such as equality and fairness should be our servants and not our masters.
Back to the gender issue. There are all sorts of reasons why women generally earn less money than men, and one is reality. In other words that’s how the world works. There are all sorts of arguments here. Women are out of the labour market on average for longer than men as they bear children and invest time in their early years. That doesn’t make them less valuable than men. In fact you could argue that they are doing a more important job than any man in nurturing the next generation.
Stuck on the front of the New Statesman last week was a headline alluding to this very subject. Helen Lewis points out in her article that ‘remarkably high proportions of the most successful women in politics are childless.’ Say no more! If you value women as mothers and to be esteemed as such this is no surprise. But if you value women according to their ability to climb the career ladder and to earn as much money as men then you are going to have a problem.