Gender wage inequality persists, study says
In a related story...
Wages in America:
The Rich Get Richer and the Rest Get Less
by JACK RASMUS (Copyright 2004)
Do you feel like you're working harder, longer hours, and still can't keep up with rising taxes, gasoline prices, utility bills, ballooning medical expenses, or the accelerating cost of paying for your kids' education?
Well, you're not alone! You're in good company. The company of tens of millions of American workers today on the same economic treadmill, having to walk faster and faster just to stay in the same place, or, unable even to keep up with the pace due to unemployment, loss of benefits, or wage cuts by their employers.
How would you like to be making $200,000 a year today after 25 years on the job? Well, if you started with the pay of an average worker 25 years ago that's what you'd be making today---if you got the same kind of raises that CEOs of American companies got for the past 25 years! The average compensation of a CEO in 1980 was about 40 times that of the average worker in his company. Today it is more than 500 times! If your pay had kept up with his, you would be making more than $200,000 this year. Of course, that didn't happen, did it? So let's see what actually did happen to the average American worker's pay over the past 25 years of the Reagan-Bush economic regime..
Stagnating Workers' Wages
In 1979 the American worker's average hourly wage was equal to $15.91 (adjusted for inflation in 2001 dollars). By 1989 it had reached only $16.63/hour. That's a gain of only 7 cents a year for the entire Reagan decade.
But wait. Things get worse! By 1995 it had risen to only $16.71, or virtually no gain whatsoever over the 6 years between 1989 and 1995. During the great 'boom years' between 1995 and 2000 it rose briefly to $18.33 per hour. In other words, from 1979 to 2000, even before the most recent Bush recession, after more than two decades the American worker's average wages increased on average only 11.5 cents per hour per year! With nearly all of that coming in the five so-called 'boom' years of 1995-2000, and most of that lost once again in the last three years. And that includes for all workers, even those with college degrees.
The picture is worse for workers who had no college degree. That's more than 100 million workers, or 72.1% of the workforce. For them there was no 'boom of 1995-2000' whatsoever. Their average real hourly wages were less at the end of 2000 than they were in 1979! And since 2000 their wages have continued to slide further.
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sorry for the dupe, please remove
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By TERESA M. MCALEAVY
The Record
HACKENSACK, N.J. - The latest data on gender pay equity shows that little progress has been made in closing the gap between what men and women earn.
In this country, women make about 76 1/2 cents for every dollar men make for doing the same job. That's up from about 63 cents three decades ago.
"The fact is the gap has closed so little in the last 30 years that, at this rate, we'll catch up in a century," said Betty Spence, president of the National Association for Female Executives. "It's really disheartening."
The latest finding is from the group's annual salary survey, which was recently released. It looked at more than 100 jobs in 20 industries nationwide and found that in 2004, men earned more in all areas, including those professions where women tend to thrive.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/3668732.html