Equal F***ing Pay for Equal F***ing Work

and I find this so completely troubling. First that we have to have an equal pay day in general for all women, then we have to have a Black women's equal pay day because as you stratifize, you go down the list of ethnicities by gender, you just lose money. Right, So here's what CNBC News says this week, Tuesday, August third, Black Women's Equal Pay Day marked the additional listen to this, two hundred and fourteen days that black women must work to catch up with white non Hispanic men what they

earned last year. In essence, this article says black women have to work for five hundred and seventy nine days to make what white men do in three hundred and sixty five. The article goes on to say this, and I want you to pay attention to these numbers because again, we have a Congress, right now that is controlled supposedly by Democrats. We have a one vote margin with the

Vice President in the Senate. And here's the thing. We have more women in Congress now than we have at any other point in history, and yet we can't manage to get a fucking equal Pay Act on the books. And so how does it work, just in general for the economy. If everyone who is working is not making what they should be making, then you're not investing in the economy and everyone loses. So I want you to

listen to this. On average, black women are currently paid only sixty three cents for every dollar paid to a non Hispanic white man. For full time working black women, this amounts to a median wage gap listen of two thousand, two thousand and nine dollars a month, twenty four thousand, one hundred and ten dollars a year, and nine hundred and sixty four thousand, four hundred dollars over a forty

year career. So you're looking at a potential loss over forty years of working before you supposedly are able to retire of close to a million fucking dollars in lost wages because of pay and equity. And this is according to the National Women's Law Center, and they say this. I've looked at this in a lot of different ways, says Jasmine Tucker, who is the director of research. I've cut it by education, I've cut it by age, I've

cut it by job. It doesn't go away. It gets a little bigger, it gets a little smaller, but the wage gap is always there. There's a wage gap in ninety four percent of occupations. Think about this because when you think about the education level, the average, the median education level of Black women, majority of black women are college educated, many have post degrees, right graduate degrees. So you're talking about a highly educated part of the black community.

Highly educated meaning on top of which you have an enormous amount of student loan debt. So not only are you trying to work twice as hard to get half as much, but you're also incurring an insane amount of debt in order to do that and still having to work two hundred and fourteen days more than your white male counterpart. How the fuck do we see these numbers?

Know that it's true, Know that it doesn't matter if you are working as a doctor, or if you're working as a teacher, or if you're working as a nurse. It does not matter. The pay gap is apparent in ninety four percent of occupations, and we have the ability to do that to change it. In other countries. Do you know that it is illegal to pay people a different wage for the same amount of work. Why is that such a pipe dream to think about here in America?

That if I am working side by side in the same office, in the same fucking position as a white man, that he is making over a dollar more than I am. How is that? Okay? You know, the justification back in the day was this, And we are so fucking far removed from the little woman stays at home, heteronormative, patriarchal

model of what our economy and work looks like. We are so far removed from the nineteen fifties in that aspect, right, But we still set up this idea that somehow white men deserve to get paid more money for doing less.

So here's the other thing that the article says. Black women who work in areas that are critical to the COVID nineteen recovery, such as doctors, nurses, teachers, childcare workers, wait staff, and cashiers, for example, make eleven to twenty seven percent less than white men, according to the data from the Economic Policy Institute, in higher paid professions, including among doctors. This broke my heart. White male physicians and surgeons make sixty three dollars and forty one cents an

hour on average. Black women in these positions make less than forty six dollars and fifty nine cents an hour. This is according to the Economic Policy Institute. The pay gap can potentially result in millions of dollars lost in wages in black female physicians lifetime. So imagine again, you're going to school for seven, eight, however many years in order to get that good paying job. You get in.

You think that you are doing it, you are doing the most, and you come to find out that you are making twenty to thirty dollars less than your colleague who studied right beside you, going through the same program, getting the same degree. This is not about fairness, because fairness comes from a place of morality and values. Right. This is about equity, and I believe that we should be in a position to be able to sue employers. Right.

We got part way there with the Lily Ledbetter Act that was signed during the Obama years, but we did not get all the way there, and it's a conversation, honestly, that does not come up enough. Over fifty percent of

the fucking population is women, over fifty percent. So you're talking about folks that if you are a single parent and you are a woman, that you are barely able to make ends meet, you should not be in a household where your husband, if you are straight again, your husband is making more money than you and you're in the same position. And this goes thinking about right, queer people, Black queer women who are coupled are more likely to be living at the poverty line than any other group.

That is insane to me, but that number is always stuck out in my head from when I was doing the research as a senior advisor at the Center for American Progress many years ago, because when you're looking at the way discriminatory policies work is that there is a huge economic component here because in order for white men to have everything that they have, the path needs to be cleared for them, which means that whatever clutter, debris and obstacles are moved out of their way are placed

in other people's way. And we just shrug this off in America, and we say, continue to lie to people and tell them, get an education, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, do the most. And you have a group of people, black women, who do all of those fucking things, check every single goddamn box, and still come up in

their lifetime a million dollars less. So when we were referred to and said to be the workhorse of this country, this is what the fuck I'm talking about, because from slavery until now, black women have never gotten their just due ever. Right, we don't even get acknowledged for the creative content that is put in being put out. So if you have kids right now who are telling you about boycotts that were happening on TikTok and other things,

it's because black creators are like, fuck, y'all. You come in here, you steal our moves, you steal our intelligence, you steal our creativity, you dress it up in whiteface, and then you push it out there, and all of a sudden, you're getting all of these ten twenty thirty thousand millions of endorsements, and meanwhile, the black creatives get nothing. It happens in every single space, in every single industry,

and it is sickening, and it should be illegal. You should get the same full dollar for work that your male counterparts get. So the article goes on to state this and again just really incredibly troubling to me. So it goes on to state this very clear fact, student loan debt, as I mentioned, caregiving duties, particularly for single black women, are among the factors that can exacerbate the

overall gender and racial wealth gap. Yet some companies are making strides, they say, to provide benefits that could help narrow the divide by providing student loan repayment assistance and subsidized childcare. So again, when I hear the likes of Nancy Pelosi utter things like canceling student loan debt isn't a good eye idea. This is who she's saying, it's

not a good idea too. There are schools right now, some that we have talked about historically black colleges, that are canceling student loan debt because they want their graduates to be able to dream, to achieve. What would you do, where would you go work, what would you invent, what would you innovate on? What business would you create if you weren't saddled with six figures of student loan debt.

It stops innovation, it stops dreaming, and it forces us to continue to be cogs in a machine that just grind us out. So it is a different form, dare I say, of indentured servitude that happens when you become a college graduate. And so when Democrats, on one hand want a campaign and tell young people, oh, we have your back, or anyone for that matter that wants to go back get certificates and degree so that they can be more competitive, you're trying to be more competitive so

that you can make more money. And we're telling black women that essentially you're a motherfucking hamster on a wheel right now, because you can keep running, and you can keep running, but you ain't ever really going to get anywhere. And that's a horrible place to be in, a horrible one to be in, particularly when we have the ability to stop it, when we have the ability to create policies that make it a federal offense for you to pay people a different amount of money for the same

goddamn jobs. I'm not talking about bonuses, folks, I'm talking about the fact that you're sitting as a cashier right, and Johnny next to you is making twenty dollars an hour and you're making twelve. But you guys are scanning the same fucking groceries. That's what is happening. That's what's been happening, and we have justified it by saying, oh, you know, the good old boys club men need to make more because they got to take care of the

little woman at home. That is not the society that we live in, and it has not been for quite some time. But our policies have not caught up to where we are currently, and that to me is incredibly frustrating. So they say that there are some fixes that employees can make, but again I'm looking in this article where there isn't any for the fixes that Congress can make. Right, So, once again we are passing the buck to private employers to do the right thing. They're not going to do

the right thing without fucking incentives. We know that no one does. So here is what they offer. Employers can make tax free contributions of up to five thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars a year to their employees student debt through twenty twenty five. That can help many workers, including black women who are among those hardest hit with

student loan debt. This is another interesting point. While mothers in general who work full time earn seventy five cents per every dollar paid to fathers, black working moms are paid just fifty two cents on the dollar. However, a recent NWLC report found that in high if high quality, affordable childcare were universally available. And again, this is the type of infrastructure that we're talking about in the America

Cares Plan. We are talking about ways in which we learned through COVID nineteen how unaffordable childcare is for most American households. And so if we were like we are doing right now with the child with the earned child tax and all of these credits that folks are able to get per child, but understand that this is running out right, all of these offers, let's say, from the federal government, have expiration dates, and we see how they

function with expiration dates. Given what happened with the moratorium on evictions. People were evicted at five o'clock in the evening that day because guess what, the extension didn't take place until five thirty. So we know that everything that is afforded two families two individuals has an expiration date, of course, if you're not a shareholder or a CEO. But there are ways that the federal government can provide a basic fucking income so people are able to close

this gap. It should not just be left to private industry to do the right thing. That is it for Today's Woke, A f daily podcast. To hear more from me, including five full hour long shows every single week, exclusive guest interviews, and more. Support me on Patreon at patreon dot com. Slash Woke f power to the people and to all the people power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.