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New Jersey state Senate committees will meet Thursday to consider a number of bills including measures to facilitate equal pay in the workplace, to promote educational stability for children in foster care, and to permit adopted persons to access family medical records.
The Labor Panel will meet at 10 a.m. in the Statehouse Annex, to consider (S-1395), a bill sponsored by Sen. Loretta Weinberg (D-Bergen), which would call upon the New Jersey Council on Gender Parity in Labor and Education to conduct studies and develop guidelines for employers to correct the conditions that lead to gender-based pay disparities.
The Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens Committee will meet at 1 p.m. in the Annex to consider a measure to help provide educational stability for children in foster care. The measure, (S-1333), sponsored by Senators Joseph F. Vitale (D-Middlesex), and Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex), would allow children who are put into foster care, or placed in a different foster home to remain in their original school district. If the state Division of Youth and Family Services determines that remaining in the school district is not in the best interest of the child, the district in which the foster parent resides would become the designated school district.
The Health and Human Services panel will also consider a group of measures aimed at giving adoptees access to family medical records. One measure, (S-799), sponsored by Vitale, would permit adult adoptees and members of their immediate family to access the adoptee's original birth certificate and other related information. Adoptive parents would be permitted to access the information on behalf of minors. Another measure, (S-1399), sponsored by Weinberg, the committee chairwoman, would allow adoptees to have access to nonidentifying family medical information.
— TOM HESTER SR., NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
What will those measures be considering the following:
Despite women's 40-year-old demand for equal wages, millions of married women still choose to have no wages at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of The Secrets of Happily Married Women, stay-at-home wives, including those who are childless, constitute a growing niche. "In the past few years,” he says in a CNN August 2008 report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier....” at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka.)
As full-time mothers or homemakers, stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living lives of luxury? Virtually any teen-ager knows the answer: “They are supported by their husband!”
If millions of wives can accept zero wages and live as well off as their employed husbands, millions of other wives can accept low wages, can refuse to work overtime, can refuse promotions, can take more unpaid days off — all because their husbands are willing to support them.
What about single women hoping to marry? Most are aware of men's willingness to sooner or later economically support the woman they marry. Thus countless single women configure their jobs, careers, and aspirations accordingly. Many actively look for a man who earns enough to offer them the three options cited by Warren Farrell in "Why Men Earn More": work full-time, work part-time, or work full-time as a housewife. These women often regard a husband as their primary employer. In return for their husband's media-unappreciated generosity, these women plan to offer him three slightly different options: work full-time, work full-time, work full-time with overtime when the wife departs from the workforce, nearly always at a time of her choosing.
Men's unappreciated willingness to support their wives is the underlying real reason for the sexes' infamous wage gap, women's 78 cents to men's dollar.
To many, the current legislation to increase women's pay is absurd because it ignores choice. As long as we're considering absurd measures, here's one that would close the gender wage gap almost overnight: a law that prohibits men from supporting women.
If men weren't allow to support women, unemployed wives would have to work. Millions of employed women would be forced to obtain a better one. “Without husbands," says Farrell, "women have to focus on earning more. They work longer hours, they're willing to relocate and they're more likely to choose higher-paying fields like technology. Women who have never been married and are childless earn 117 percent of their childless male counterparts." (See http://tinyurl.com/nm6t6s.)
And how would men be affected? No doubt large numbers would gleefully walk away from high-paying, stressful jobs, sending employers into a frenzy to recruit women.
Men would earn less, women more. Gone would be the sexes' wage gap. A feminist fantasy come true!
(From “A Male Matters Response to the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act” at http://tinyurl.com/pvbrcu )