Some 5,400 additional pages of documents relating to John Roberts became available yesterday, and some of them are especially interesting to us and the press. A few relate to something called “comparable worth” – also known as “pay equity.” What is that? It’s a way of closing the pay gap between men and women. It does so by calling on employers to evaluate the jobs in their workplace to determine whether – as is often the case -- those jobs predominantly held by women are underpaid (that is, paid less than jobs predominantly held by men that are comparable in skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions), and if so, to come up with a plan to raise the wages of the jobs found to be underpaid.
John Roberts was clearly no fan of this concept! Here’s what he said in one 1984 memo on the subject: “It is difficult to exaggerate the perniciousness of the ‘comparable worth’ theory. It mandates nothing less than central planning of the economy by judges." In another memo, he commented on a letter sent to the White House by three women members of the House of Representatives (Olympia Snowe, Nancy Johnson and Claudine Schneider), in which they laid out the problem of lower pay for female-dominated occupations; expressed support for a federal court ruling for the plaintiffs in a comparable worth case brought under Title VII, the federal law barring sex discrimination in employment; and asked the Administration not to get involved in the case. Roberts wrote, “I honestly find it troubling that three Republican representatives are so quick to embrace such a radical redistributive concept. Their slogan may as well be ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to her gender.’” This last reference seems to play on a maxim from Karl Marx.
But pay equity is not “central planning of the economy by judges” or by anyone, let alone a Marxist system. In fact, many states and localities across the U.S. have done exactly this kind of pay adjustment for their workforces. Where female-dominated jobs were found to be undervalued and underpaid, women’s wages were raised. To us, that seems like a good thing.
These documents suggest a highly dismissive attitude toward efforts to secure fair pay for women. They are also yet another example of John Roberts’s pattern of narrowly reading the laws that protect women from discrimination. We’ve seen that he advocated positions undermining Title IX. He argued against equal protection for women under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. He argued that blockades directed against women seeking abortions did not constitute sex discrimination under federal law. And now we can add: he belittled legal arguments supporting fair pay for women.
