Another Day, Another 77 Cents
January 2006
When I was 18 I needed a job. My mother had moved to Boston to work as a consult-ant for corporate and municipal clients. It was 1971. I had read Sisterhood Is Powerful and Dialectics of Sex. I wanted a job that paid well, which meant I refused to look at secretarial positions. I applied to drive a delivery van for some widget company. It was the small kind of van, not unlike the minivans driven by soccer moms today. The owner refused on the spot to consider me, saying I was too weak as a female to carry his widgets around. I walked back to the car where my girlfriend was waiting. It was a VW bug and the only way it started was if you popped the clutch. It was my turn to push.
A year or two later, I landed a job on the line at the Chrysler plant in Fenton. Building Dodge vans. I made about $10.00 an hour. It wasn’t easy to get that job. It took the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and a major class action lawsuit against Chrysler to keep my application out of the trash. Many thanks are due to the women and men who fought those battles.
By 1974, I had begun work at Left Bank Books, which I would co-own by 1978. Ironically, it would take me until the 21st century to match my men’s union-scale wages at Chrysler. When I deliver my 30-to-50 pound boxes of books, it’s in my station wagon. Owning a bookstore (or even working in one), is the surest way to keep your salary at some quaint, retro level in comparison with the rest of the workforce. The male workforce, that is. Because apparently, nothing much has changed since I was job-hunting back in the stone ages.
Evelyn Murphy, author of Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men—and What to Do About it, visits our store January 10th. Among the many disturbing facts in her book is this one: in the 1960s, women earned 59 cents for every dollar earned by men. Since the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, women have managed to close the distance by a whopping 18 cents! According to statistics presented by Evelyn, 42 years after Title VII was enacted, women earn only 77 cents to every man’s dollar.
I believe Evelyn Murphy when she tells me the wage gap persists. She’s an economist. She was the first woman to be elected to a statewide office—Lieutenant Governor—in Massachusetts. She is founder and president of the WAGE (Women Are Getting Even) Project, Inc. But on a more personal note, she was also a colleague and for a time, business partner of my mother’s in her consulting work. It’s great to be able to catch up with her again, if only to compare unlevel playing fields.
I’ve been thinking a lot about unlevel playing fields. It strikes me that booksellers have much in common with the female labor force. Not only do women earn 77 cents on the dollar compared to men for paid labor, they contribute an incalculable amount to the health of our economy and culture.
As do bookstores. As small businesses, bookstores are part of the sector of the economy responsible for the greatest amount of job creation in this country. As locally-owned businesses, we also reinvest in the local economy an estimated three times over what our mega-box store competitors contribute. We also don our superhero suits and fight to preserve Civil Rights, such as those threatened by certain provisions of the Patriot Act.
As if that isn’t enough, as "Main Street" retailers, booksellers also collect and pay sales tax which finances key aspects of state and local public services. Our largest e-tail competitor— the one that wears the scarlet A—pays no sales tax to St. Louis or the state of Missouri for the business it takes out of our state. Not only does this give them an unfair competitive advantage, it costs the state millions in lost revenue. Revenue that might have been spent on childcare, education, and antipoverty initiatives.
That’s why I was delighted to note in Congress’s pre-holiday recess activities, that a Republican Senator from Wyoming had introduced legislation that would level the sales tax playing field by establishing a method for remote e-tailers and catalogue companies to pay the same sales tax Main Street retailers do. While I haven’t yet seen the details of Senator Michael Enzi’s bill, I’m hopeful. Only 19 states— and Missouri is not one of them—have enacted fair tax legislation. Enzi’s bill would create a uniform system by which all states would benefit. This is possibly the most exciting thing to happen in my retail life since the development of independent local business alliances.
Fabulous advocates like my mother and Evelyn Murphy, still have work to do to level the playing field. Booksellers do too. Many days I feel like I’m still pushing that VW Bug around. Difference is, I don’t feel like I’m doing it alone anymore.
When I was 18 I needed a job. My mother had moved to Boston to work as a consult-ant for corporate and municipal clients. It was 1971. I had read Sisterhood Is Powerful and Dialectics of Sex. I wanted a job that paid well, which meant I refused to look at secretarial positions. I applied to drive a delivery van for some widget company. It was the small kind of van, not unlike the minivans driven by soccer moms today. The owner refused on the spot to consider me, saying I was too weak as a female to carry his widgets around. I walked back to the car where my girlfriend was waiting. It was a VW bug and the only way it started was if you popped the clutch. It was my turn to push.
A year or two later, I landed a job on the line at the Chrysler plant in Fenton. Building Dodge vans. I made about $10.00 an hour. It wasn’t easy to get that job. It took the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and a major class action lawsuit against Chrysler to keep my application out of the trash. Many thanks are due to the women and men who fought those battles.
By 1974, I had begun work at Left Bank Books, which I would co-own by 1978. Ironically, it would take me until the 21st century to match my men’s union-scale wages at Chrysler. When I deliver my 30-to-50 pound boxes of books, it’s in my station wagon. Owning a bookstore (or even working in one), is the surest way to keep your salary at some quaint, retro level in comparison with the rest of the workforce. The male workforce, that is. Because apparently, nothing much has changed since I was job-hunting back in the stone ages.
Evelyn Murphy, author of Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men—and What to Do About it, visits our store January 10th. Among the many disturbing facts in her book is this one: in the 1960s, women earned 59 cents for every dollar earned by men. Since the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, women have managed to close the distance by a whopping 18 cents! According to statistics presented by Evelyn, 42 years after Title VII was enacted, women earn only 77 cents to every man’s dollar.
I believe Evelyn Murphy when she tells me the wage gap persists. She’s an economist. She was the first woman to be elected to a statewide office—Lieutenant Governor—in Massachusetts. She is founder and president of the WAGE (Women Are Getting Even) Project, Inc. But on a more personal note, she was also a colleague and for a time, business partner of my mother’s in her consulting work. It’s great to be able to catch up with her again, if only to compare unlevel playing fields.
I’ve been thinking a lot about unlevel playing fields. It strikes me that booksellers have much in common with the female labor force. Not only do women earn 77 cents on the dollar compared to men for paid labor, they contribute an incalculable amount to the health of our economy and culture.
As do bookstores. As small businesses, bookstores are part of the sector of the economy responsible for the greatest amount of job creation in this country. As locally-owned businesses, we also reinvest in the local economy an estimated three times over what our mega-box store competitors contribute. We also don our superhero suits and fight to preserve Civil Rights, such as those threatened by certain provisions of the Patriot Act.
As if that isn’t enough, as "Main Street" retailers, booksellers also collect and pay sales tax which finances key aspects of state and local public services. Our largest e-tail competitor— the one that wears the scarlet A—pays no sales tax to St. Louis or the state of Missouri for the business it takes out of our state. Not only does this give them an unfair competitive advantage, it costs the state millions in lost revenue. Revenue that might have been spent on childcare, education, and antipoverty initiatives.
That’s why I was delighted to note in Congress’s pre-holiday recess activities, that a Republican Senator from Wyoming had introduced legislation that would level the sales tax playing field by establishing a method for remote e-tailers and catalogue companies to pay the same sales tax Main Street retailers do. While I haven’t yet seen the details of Senator Michael Enzi’s bill, I’m hopeful. Only 19 states— and Missouri is not one of them—have enacted fair tax legislation. Enzi’s bill would create a uniform system by which all states would benefit. This is possibly the most exciting thing to happen in my retail life since the development of independent local business alliances.
Fabulous advocates like my mother and Evelyn Murphy, still have work to do to level the playing field. Booksellers do too. Many days I feel like I’m still pushing that VW Bug around. Difference is, I don’t feel like I’m doing it alone anymore.
posted by Left Bank Books at 10:40 AM
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