Fair pay?

I've been meaning to write about men and patriarchy on here for a wee while, and then Kate and an anonymous commenter started an interesting dialogue on Kate's post, so it was a good push in the right direction.

This is not a post about the Telegraph. This is not a post "defending" feminism. This is also not a post about saying who has it "worse". This is a post about the often-heard cry of "What about the men? The patriarchy hurts men too!" that I shall refer to as PHMT.

Let's take the example of equal pay. Equal pay for equal work. It's been feminist orthodoxy for longer than I care to think about, with the rationale that work is (equally worthy) work, whoever is doing it.

It's certainly the case that there is a gender-based trend with regard to certain work being unpaid or underpaid. This is a feminist concern.

It's also the case that not all the work that is underpaid is work done traditionally by women. There are a whole bunch of hard, skilled, boring, or dangerous jobs out there that are done predominantly by blue-collar men. Often: non-White men. Often: immigrant men. Often: working-class men.

For sure, I don't want to be paid less than my male co-workers for doing the same job: it's just not fair.

I also don't want the same shitty National Minimum below-the-breadline wage as the bloke next to me on [some basically shitty job]. My work is work. His work is work. We should both be able to put roofs over our heads and food on our tables. If we can't, that's also not fair. I also happen to think it's not fair that some people have to work basically shitty jobs.

So fair pay, to my mind, means something more than just saying "I want same number of pounds sterling per hour as the men I work with". It means "we all get fair pay". It means we have to re-think how the money is distributed and how the work is distributed. It means we have to re-think what fair means. "The same for men and women" is part of it, but not all of it.

The patriarchy does hurt men too, in lots of ways. (Lack of) Fair pay is just one way, and we can say that and also, at the same time, say that there is a specific problem with discrimination against women in pay and employment.

But PHMT is a problem feminism needs to take seriously. If for no other reason than that the Fair Pay Problem shows that men's liberation (and antiracism, anti-xenophobia, and anti-classism) are part and parcel of women's liberation.

--IP