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By Stanley P. Gershbein
Brooklyn Daily
In my list of questions for discussion last week I intentionally omitted one and saved it for today. Should women and men earn the same salary? Absolutely, positively, definitely Yes! Yes! Yes!
Providing, of course, that they do the same work and put in the same amount of time.
President Obama stated in a speech last month that women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. What he forgot to say was that the amount of work and time was not equal. There unfortunately is still a pay gap difference, but that 23 cents is just not true. Women devote a great deal of their time to motherhood and that time often is costly.
The following is from my own experiences and may or may not agree with yours.
I bought my first store way back in 1961. I started every employee, regardless of sex, age, color or religion, at the same salary. Unfortunately it never stayed that way. Often it was the women who would tell me, “Stan. I’m leaving two hours early on Thursday. I have to take Jeffrey to the dentist.” Or, “Stan. Tomorrow is open-school day and I have to leave for an hour.” That one hour was always two or three hours. The denials about those hours forced me to buy a time clock. If this was only a once in a while thing I would let it go, but Jeffrey’s dental work was a weekly thing that went on and on. If, god forbid, I asked mommy to give me back those hours on Saturday, I heard, “What? On Saturday? Oh, No! That’s my weekend.”
Okay. No problem. That’s when I started paying her for the thirty-five hours a week that she worked. She screamed that I was punishing her because she was a mother. I ignored that comment.
Here’s more. Men go to the bathroom, do what they have to do, and return in five minutes. In my experiences, women spend a lot more time there. One of the women at our dinner table admitted that she uses that time to refresh her make-up, call the beauty parlor to make an appointment, call her husband, her children, but “It’s only a minute.” She was greeted by all in the room with the universal comment “B-------!”
In all of the years that I owned and operated businesses, I never once had a man tell me that he has to take off for open-school day or that he has to take Jeffrey to the dentist. It is true that fathers are not mothers. Upon a rare occasion I would hear about a funeral, an accident or a dental emergency. I never once docked a man for that rare occasion.
Please don’t misunderstand. There were exceptional instances and reasons when women’s paychecks were larger than their male counterparts, but they were rare.
I am StanGershbein@Bellsouth.net repeating that the above is from my own personal experiences. Can we hear yours?
Editor’s note: Stan’s opinions do not reflect those of Courier Life or, more specifically, its editor, a father who went to a parent-teacher conference on Thursday morning. With his wife.