>No kidding. Wage equations try to account for this in part by including
>experience, which means that women who take time off to have kids will
>show up as having less experience. The point is that even women (or
>blacks) who appear equally qualified, and who are probably equally
>productive, get paid less than white men. You have pre-market
>discrimination, and within-market discrimination. I'm not denying
>structural sexism or racism; I'm saying that discrim happens even after
>all these things are accounted for. I don't know why you're getting so
>vehement about this.
>
>Doug
!!!! i can never get vehement with you unless you begged me first!
i noted that jordan raised the productivity issue. i pointed out that people care about productivity often because they want to show that those who aren't as productive are, therefore, getting paid what they deserve.
i pointed out that it is precisely this unquestioned assumption that reveals the operations of structural racism and sexism and obscures the exploitive aspects and uses to which racism and sexism are put.
of course we all agree that there is purposeful discrimination and that is awful and must be eliminated. but to focus on that alone is to ignore the way, in this case, the reasons why some workers aren't productive is premised upon the conventional marxist (and bourgois economist) assumptions that the work/economy/production is separate from family/reproduction. so, caring for family matters -- from health care, emotional care of others, children, elderly, partners, etc-- is work that capital depends on and profits from because it is "free" -- and yet! we are penalized for doing this very work by being labeled as "not as productive" and therefore deserving of less pay!
exposing that --those hidden assumptions about what is normal, acceptable, good, right, true, no biggie--is what gets people to question the very pillars upon which a capitalist system is built. this is not to say that racism and sexism in the form of bigotry, prejudice and discrimination don't.
by looking at structural oppression in this way we can see that it can become detached from and operate independently of its sexist and racist roots and continue to operate in the service of capitalist exploitation -- and not just by keeping groups of people subordinate to other groups, but by making us assume that work "productivity" is something we should measure by virtue of assuming that time spent of "reproduction" is somehow detracting from productivity!
my own concerns about all this is that i'm not sure how to conceptualize this in terms of race, particularly if it sounds like one is saying, "well, it's really about class" -- that bothers me. the feminist materialist understanding of structural oppression-exploitation nexus (or perhaps better: constellation) goes a long way to getting at what dennis breslin has been talking about, but it doesn't deal adequately with race. and i don't have time to pull my books and start reading stuff on race theory/class that i've not read in awhile. i'm sure there's plenty to move such an analysis forward and has been done already.
kelley