Equal pay for equal work

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. (I Corinthians 13:11)

I was thinking of this quote from the Apostle Paul, in the context of my post over the weekend about the sacking of Jerry Trupiano and the current Red Sox debacle in the radio broadcast booth. While sports occupies more than its fair share of time in my life, often defining it and not always for the best, I want to leave the bread and circuses and get back to something more “adult” to write about.

Before moving on, however, I want to say that my posts on sports often generate some of my highest traffic at Words Matter. These posts are often the ones that get picked up by other sites and linked to, also. I’m not really sure what that means.

Our friends at the Department of Labor in Maine have some pretty provocative material about the lack of equality of women’s wages in Maine. In fact, there is quite a bit of information being funneled out on this topic nationally, as tomorrow is Equal Pay Day, when symbolically, this is the day when a woman's wages catch up to those of men wages from the previous year, or in simple terms, this is the amount of additional time from January 1st that women must work on to earn what a man’s wages are on December 31st. This gap is even greater for women of color.

Women generally do better in the northeast and the west, with Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont leading the way in New England (ranked 3, 5, and 6th nationally—the District of Columbia is numero uno). Not surprisingly, the south and in particular, Arkansas, Louisiana, West Virginia and Mississippi, come in dead last on pay equity.

Maine actually scored well, falling in the middle third on median annual earnings and in the top third in number of women in professional and managerial positions.

Still, earning 77 cents for every one dollar that a man earns is nothing to do cartwheels over. Newly hired women actually earn 66 cents for every one dollar that newly hired men earn.

Here are some things that women should know about Maine law and pay equity:

• In 1965, Maine law replaced “equal pay for equal labor” with “comparable pay for comparable labor” to reflect that women often earn less for work that is equal in skill, effort, and responsibility to the work performed by men.
• The Maine Department of Labor enforces equal pay laws, but only after a complaint is filed.
• Under federal law, employers cannot decrease a worker’s wage to comply with the equal pay law. They must raise the lower paid worker’s pay.
• The Bureau of Labor Standards will assist employers who want to ensure they are practicing equal pay.

As the Maine Wage Project states, “the most effective way for women to earn equal pay is to ask for it.”

FMI about the Equal Pay Law in Maine, contact theMaine Department of Labor at 624-6400.

Pox on the Sox

I grew up listening to baseball on the radio. Like many of us 40-somethings, we cut our baseball teeth with a transistor radio and in New England, the play-by-play of longtime radio fixtures, Ken Coleman and Ned Martin, with the third man in the booth being a former Red Sox legend like Mel Parnell, or Johnny Pesky. While there was plenty of Sox games being broadcast on television during the late 60s and early 70s (courtesy of Schaefer Beer, btw—“Schaefer is the one beer to have when your having more than one.”), it just seemed like baseball was meant for transmission via WHDH-850 AM, over a transistor radio.

The Red Sox radio team of Joe Castiglione and Jerry Trupiano were in the same class as the old Coleman/Martin partnership. Who could forget “Trup’s” classic call, “Swing and a drive! Way back, Waaaay back! Home run!” whenever one of the Sox players homered?

Of course, that call has been silenced, as Trupiano was unceremoniously let go, two weeks prior to Christmas, by New England’s team. After 10 years of stellar work forming one of baseball’s best play-by-play teams on the radio side, team president, Larry Luchino saw fit to bring in his own guys. Castiglione is still in the booth, albeit on a part-time basis, but the new radio personalities; Dave O’Brien, who comes over from ESPN, where he’ll continue to do games and the lackluster—no, fucking pathetic—Glenn Geffner. It seems as though quality and commitment to the integrity of baseball that Joe and Jerry brought to the booth are no longer in demand at Fenway, any longer.

This change has been bothering me since opening day, when, while driving home and listening to the amateurish Geffner, who reminded me of the hacks that call high school sporting events on low-power local stations found in rural parts of states like Maine, I had to call my buddy, who was watching the game on television and tell him, “turn the radio on!” He was like, “Why?” I told him, “Because the Red Sox have the worst announcer I’ve ever heard calling the game with Castig.”

I haven’t written about it until now, simply because I’ve been so busy and every time I meant to look up what happened to Trupiano, I got sidetracked, or pointed in some other direction of importance.

While O’Brien is passable, he sounds like just another “cookie cutter” announcer (epitomized by his lackluster call on Big Papi's homer today) that one finds calling sports on national networks, like the God-awful Fox baseball team of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver.

I’ve been finding it increasingly difficult to root for the Sox for several seasons, going back to 2002, when corporate milqetoast, John Henry (certainly no steel-drivin' man), purchased the club from the John Harrington and the Yawkey trust. I find that everytime Henry finds his way into the booth with Remy and Orsillo, I like the team considerably less. Henry, who epitomizes so many monied white males, who were the last guy off the bench on his Little League team and never played the game competitively after they were 12, reveal their lack of baseball pedigree every time they open their mouths to talk baseball. Of course, who the heck am I to criticize him, as his pocket change is probably greater than my total financial assets.

I know that Red Sox Nation (a corporate media driven commodity in its own right) continues to gain converts, particularly after finally winning the World Series in 2004, but with the team’s embrace of the corporate mindset that is professional sports, the co-mingling of NASCAR with baseball (Henry is a co-owner with Roush Fenway Racing) and the Trupiano incident, I think I’ve officially left the Nation for good. Add to that the fact that most of the team is a combination of right-wing, flag-waving Bush supporters and members of the “God squad” and I don’t find the Red Sox a very compelling team any longer.

It might be time for me to throw my allegiance back to the senior circuit and begin watching Braves games again (as I did through much of the 90s).

Cultural/racial insensitivity

I have blogged about Lewiston/Auburn on several occasions. Lewiston has special significance to me. I am Franco-American on my mother’s side. Her mother and father, my Memere and Pepere (which is Acadian for grandmother and grandfather), immigrated to Lewiston from Quebec, in the 1930s.

Beginning in the 1870s, when railroad connections to Canada were completed, French-Canadian immigrants came in droves, to work in the textile mills that lined the banks of the Androscoggin River. The textile industry provided the economic backbone of the city and the foundation that gave this area its rich Franco-American heritage. By the 1950s, textile production began moving south, following cheaper labor costs. Still, shoes and manufacturing provided an adequate economic base for the area.

By the 1970s, the economic bottom had fallen out and this once proud city began a 30 year downward spiral. Recently, the area begun to recover from the loss of wages attributed to textiles, shoes and manufacturing.

In 2003, Lewiston was thrust onto the international stage when Matthew Hale brought his gospel of racial hatred to the city, seizing upon a letter that the mayor at the time, Larry Raymond wrote, urging Somalis (who had been immigrating first, to Portland and then, to Lewiston, since 2000) to stop their migration to his city.

Since then, racial incidents have flared and then died down. Back in July 2006, Brent Matthews, a local thug, rolled a pig’s head down the aisle at a local mosque, on Lisbon Street. While the nearly 3,000 refugees and immigrants from Somalia, the Sudan and other countries on the African continent have begun assimilating and are clearly an important element in this city of 36,000, tensions remain.

Once again, an incident involving Somalis and cultural insensitivity has caused concern from some and cries of “PC” from others. Last Wednesday (April 11), a student at Lewiston Middle School placed a ham steak in a bag on a lunch table where Somali students were eating. Muslims consider pork unclean and offensive. For many of the students, this was reminiscent of the pig's head incident back in July. While it has drawn a great deal of criticism, especially from the racially intolerant and certain kinds of right-wing bloggers, it is being investigated as a possible hate crime by local police and it has involved the Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence is working with the school to create a response plan.

According to Stephen Wessler, executive director of the Center for Prevention of Hate Violence, the incident is “extraordinarily hurtful and degrading" to Muslims, whose religion prohibits them from being around ham pork. It's important to respond swiftly, Wessler said.Wessler is concerned about this excalating into something bigger and possibly violent.

“Incidents like this that involve degrading language or conduct are often said by the perpetrator as a joke. I know that conduct is never static," he said. "It's part of a process of escalation.”

Like Wessler, I'm concerned.

If you have the opportunity, read some of the comments accompanying this article online, at the Lewiston Sun Journal site. I found them fairly instructive into how some in the community view members of the refugee and immigrant communities. In my opinion, there is an implied ugliness residing just below the surface with many of these.

Spending much of my time in Lewiston, in my current position, as well as getting involved in some community-based organizations has given me an opportunity to experience the city in a way that I haven’t for many years.

I’m encouraged by some of the things that I see, but I’m also concerned when youngsters (aged 13 and 14), who in my opinion, are merely modeling the behavior of adults in their lives, think its ok to insult someone in a very symbolic way, by placing pork on their table.

Unlike many posting comments, I don’t view these new residents in a negative light. I find them warm, accommodating and willing to adapt to our customs as often as they can. I’ve come to appreciate many of their customs and am trying to learn to be as culturally sensitive to them, as I’ve found them to be towards me. I also respect their right to practice their religion and its customs and dietary laws. To me, this is the model of give and take that makes for a healthy community.

Processing tragedy

For the next few weeks, we’ll hear about the Virginia Tech shootings. The professional news readers, sitting in their seats of importance, less for their journalistic credentials than for their ability to sell units of consumer items, will determine the arc of this story. They’ll question the school officials, the police, the parents and anyone else that they can possibly impugn for a crime that has no real explanation. Is it possible to rationally come to terms with an irrational act?

We’ll read about the details, about the killer and how his life, actions, words, screamed “warning,” “warning,” “warning!!” Interestingly, for all those supposed signs of trouble, no one saw fit to intervene—that’s just not something we do.

On the day when lives came to a standstill for the families with college students enrolled at the school, media sycophants began swarming the Blacksburg, Virginia campus, like hound dogs after a scent, interviewing students still reeling from the shock of staring down the barrel of a 9mm handgun. Trying to make sense of it all, these young adults became painfully aware that this something more than a video game, or an exercise in virtual reality.

Like Columbine, some eight years earlier, almost to the day, mayhem was visited like some Old Testament act of vengeance upon a school campus. No longer a refuge where youth retreated to experience the life of the mind, the cracks in American higher learning were fractured by the “pop, pop, pop” of semi-automatic gunfire.

Since I dropped a biblical reference above, what gives at NPR, yesterday morning? Why did this supposed bastion of “hard news” and journalistic integrity have to resort to the faith-based angle of this story, involving an evangelical youth pastor, Matt Rogers. I realize that the majority of Americans self-identify as religious, but how often will people go to the well of faith, only to have their faith shat upon by a supposed loving God? Since the topic of mental illness and insanity are being discussed in terms of motive, why not talk about the insanity of trying to paper over this tragedy with an empty veneer of faith, at least the superficial kind of faith featured by NPR?

It’s difficult to process any event in our current media-saturated culture. As hard as we try to step outside the vortex of the 24/7 news cycle, it keeps pulling us back towards its core, shredding any attempts at objectivity and reaching our own conclusions. Americans feel most comfortable running in packs and we’ll seek our own comfort group on this event, like any other.

Cataclysmic events require some element of context. In trying to frame the killings of young people who had futures brimming with hope to look forward to, we’ll be bombarded with multiple rationales and none will bring any sense of satisfaction or modicum of comfort.

Like most issues involving loss of life, sides will get chosen and the polarization will begin. One side will demand that we take guns out of the hands of killers and the other will posture that we need more guns to protect us from cold-blooded killers that maim and murder. The Rambo choir will puff out their macho chests and insist that if they were there, they’d have shot the killer before he had a chance to squeeze off his first shot.

The sad premise of this position, in my way of thinking at least, is holding to this line of thought that we need guns to protect ourselves, invalidates the notion that we have still an implied social contract and that we can live our lives, not bother anyone and live to see another day, not being concerned with being shot up by some crazy, with easy access to a lethal weapon.

Familiarity with Neil Postman’s critiques of media and communication, at least helps me understand my own morning news experience today, at 5:30 am. While having my first cup of coffee of the morning, the CNN/American Morning team of John Roberts and Kiran Chetry were seen on location, with a set that somehow reminded me of the sets that ESPN and Fox use for Sunday afternoon football.

These two meticulously groomed, good-looking and well put together news hosts were blathering on about motives, the killer’s background, the way that the Virginia Tech campus had come together during a spectacular candlelight vigil, replete with chants of “Hokie, Hokie.” Then, we were treated to a cutaway, which Postman, in his inimitable way, would have been wowed by. As he wrote about in Amusing Ourselves to Death (I’m paraphrasing), …news items are stripped from local context, commodified, and given to the viewer in bit-sized chunks, separated by the "now.... this!" phenomenon, which serves to make the viewer dismiss it all as meaningless candy he or she can do nothing about. The "now... this!" phenomenon can be tried on any news broadcast. Tonight, for example, and update on the Iraq will be followed by ("now.... this!") Britney Spears' (or insert any vapid cultural reference here) latest escapades. Postman indicated that this serves to reduce it all to meaningless trivia.

This morning’s cutaway was of a 50-ish boomer, washing his classic automobile, while his wife sashays provocatively by, with her bedroom eyes and the poor sap is faced with the choice of finishing rinsing the soap of his expensive piece of machinery (with all its own psychological ramifications and what it says about his virility) and going upstairs for a roll in the hay with his well-preserved wife. Well, of course, he positions the sprinkler to rinse away the soap, while he is seen going through the door and then the camera shows the shot of the upstairs window, with the shades being pulled and the final camera shot of the water hitting the side of his Stingray, with the white soap dripping off the gleaming metal—what was the product? Of course: Viagra! Guns, carnage and hours of ample erections—good Lord!

There are certainly discussions that events like this one at Virginia Tech ought to promote. Unfortunately, meaningful dialogue will instead be superseded by psychobabble, politicos seeking to score points and garner support for their latest run for office.

I hope the administration and the community at large in Blacksburg have some real leaders. They’ll need some to get through the tragedy and maybe even more difficult in the short run, the damage that will be done by the media feeding frenzy that is now the norm when tragedies like this occur.

The enemy is not Don Imus

Don Imus apparently crossed the Rubicon, regarding matters of what’s tolerable, or not, on syndicated radio. Last Wednesday, Imus referred to members of the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy headed hos,” sparking a fire of outrage that led to his firing, on Thursday.

Imus has made a career of making remarks about blacks, women, fat people and others that various groups have deemed offensive. The fact of his firing wasn’t particularly surprising, given the nature of today’s media environment, where today’s star can easily become persona non grata on the basis of an ill-informed and “insensitive” remark.

It’s not surprising that two of the people yelling the loudest for Imus’ removal were Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the apparent spokesmen for all black Americans. Both of these men have made careers of cherry-picking causes to champion, flashing the race card whenever the possibility of face time in front of the camera became available.

Since I’m not black, I won’t try to speak about issues pertinent to black people. I will, however, highlight black spokespeople that I think have something relevant to say on the matter. One such person is Jason Whitlock, a sportswriter from Kansas City, who I think has the ability to cut through the smoke regularly, writing about sports, but on occasion, he also has something to say about society in a much larger context than the narrow parameters of his sports beat.

Whitlock points out the hypocrisy of equal-opportunity race pandering. While I’ve never been a fan of the I-man and his posse of tired, middle-aged cranks that made up his morning drive team, I also recognize that he’s not the only person who has ever uttered an untoward remark about women, blacks, or any other member of America’s protected classes. Interestingly, white men, poor whites from the south, or divorced fathers desiring custody of their children don’t seem to fall under that umbrella.

As Whitlock deftly delineates, black comedians, like Dave Chappelle, routinely use racially insensitive material, all in the service of humor, yet he’s rewarded with $50 million (from Comedy Central) for his schtick. Apparently, it all depends on who’s doing the routine, whether it gets deemed racist, or not.

Whitlock writes,

“I watched the Rutgers news conference and was ashamed.

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for eight minutes in 1963 at the March on Washington. At the time, black people could be lynched and denied fundamental rights with little thought. With the comments of a talk-show host most of her players had never heard of before last week serving as her excuse, Vivian Stringer (the Rutgers coach) rambled on for 30 minutes about the amazing season her team had.

Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that the comments of a man with virtually no connection to the sports world ruined Rutgers’ wonderful season. Had a broadcaster with credibility and a platform in the sports world uttered the words Imus did, I could understand a level of outrage.

But an hour long press conference over a man who has already apologized, already been suspended and is already insignificant is just plain intellectually dishonest. This is opportunism. This is a distraction.”

I agree with Whitlock’s points about where the real enemies of black people are; they certainly don’t reside on the air with Don Imus.

In keeping with the spirit of Whitock’s commentary, I’d go even further and say, as I have at other times that the real issue in America is less about race and much more about class. The Imus episode is just another case of media white noise, getting us to take our eyes of the real enemies of everyday Americans.

For those who hold the power in America, they’d much rather we focused on Don Imus and his poorly chosen remarks about a women’s college basketball team, than the issues of economic injustice and the widening gap in our country between the obscenely rich and the rest of us. As long as our attention is diverted from those things that are truly dangerous, those making the important decisions can keep on keeping on, while the rest of us find it exceedingly difficult to garner attention for issues that matter.