Self-interest pretending to be expertise

Aug 30th, 2017 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog
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Speaking of Ivanka Trump’s pretensions to being a supporter of women’s “empowerment” and a legitimate senior adviser to a head of state – she endorses Trump’s intervention on the equal pay front.

The Trump administration, with the backing of first daughter Ivanka, has suspended a policy proposed by President Obama that would have made it easier for women and people of color to identify whether they were being paid less than white male counterparts at work.

Under the scheme, private employers with over 100 workers would have had to disclose pay data to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on top of information on gender, race, and ethnicity already provided to the agency.

The policy was intended to help close the pernicious gender wage gap, which sees women and people of color paid far less than white men for the same jobs.

Ivanka Trump, who has built a brand off the claim that she supports working women, issued a statement supporting the move by the Office of Management and Budget.

“Ultimately, while I believe the intention was good and agree that pay transparency is important, the proposed policy would not yield the intended results,” said the first daughter, who recently published a book called ‘Women Who Work’ and markets a clothing and accessories line to working women.

How the hell does she know? Who is she to make that claim? What is the source of her expertise?

Activists who focus on pay equality have blasted this decision, with the executive director of Make It Work, a nonprofit aimed at improving women’s economic lives, calling it “a blatant attack on women.”

“To suspend a crucial Obama-era initiative aimed at increasing pay transparency and reducing the gender and racial pay gap is an unacceptable and deliberate attack on women in the workplace, especially black and Hispanic women who are currently paid only 63 cents and 54 cents to the dollar white men are paid, respectively,” said Tracy Sturdivant, who cofounded the Make It Work campaign.

But Ivanka Trump knows better because…what?

Oh wait, I know – it’s because she’s an employer and a purchaser. She doesn’t want to pay her employees more and she doesn’t want to pay more for the merch she sells. It’s not that she actually thinks it wouldn’t work; she’s lying just like Daddy about that – it’s that she thinks it will cost her money.

The CEO of the nonprofit National Women’s Law Center called the decision to halt the pay data disclosure initiative a “tremendous setback.”

“What they have said is that they thought this was ‘burdensome,'” said Fatima Goss Graves, who leads the organization aimed at advancing women’s equality. “That language has been used to halt all progress on civil rights — it’s not a new term.”

Goss Graves added that Ivanka Trump’s support of the administration’s move “entirely blows up the notion that she’s a champion of women’s issues.”

To put it mildly.

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