Equal Pay For Equal Work
Published: June 20th, 2006
By: Jim Mullen

Equal pay for equal work

By Jim Mullen

Nea Columnist

Like most people, I’m not very good at remembering jokes. But every now and then one sticks with me like a bare thigh on a hot vinyl car seat. A guy wrote to Reader’s Digest a few years ago to say that one day as he was driving his 5-year-old daughter to kindergarten, she turned to him and asked, “Dad, when did Mom come to work for us?”

I remembered the line when it was recently reported that if you had to pay a salary to a full-time, stay-at-home mom for all the different work she did – the baby-sitting, the cooking, the cleaning, the shopping, the chauffeuring, the overtime – it would cost you $134,000 a year.

Now if you are a man, especially a successful businessman, you know how ridiculous that figure is. It’s as if it’s been pulled out of thin air. For the baby-sitting alone a successful businessman would pay himself up to $5 million a year. And he’d also want the family jet to be available to him at all times, as well as the use of the family-owned condos in Paris, Rome, Martinique and Hawaii.

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