Page 6
New Prices
Effective
May 1, 2014
September 2, 2015
O PINION
Martin Paying the Pink Tax at $1,400 a Year
Unfair markups
Cleaning for gender
Service
M ARTHA B URK
You probably think
you know about all the
taxes you pay. Income
taxes, property taxes,
sales taxes — it seems
like the list is end-
less. But there’s one
tax I’ve been paying for most of
my life that you might not know
about. If you’re a woman, chanc-
es are you’re paying it too.
It’s called the pink tax.
What is it? It’s the premium
you pay for goods and services
that are marketed to women, even
when they’re identical to those
sold as “men’s” products at a
cheaper price. One study calcu-
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Carpet & Upholstery
Cleaning
Residential &
Commercial Services
Minimum Service CHG.
$45.00
$VPDOOGLVWDQFHWUDYHO
charge may be applied
CARPET CLEANING
2 Cleaning Areas or
more $30.00 Each Area
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lated this “tax” at an extra $1,400
a year.
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in drugstores — stuff
like razors, deodorants,
wrinkle creams, shaving
creams, even pain killers.
The pink tax also creeps
in at dry cleaners, where a
plain women’s white shirt
often costs more than a
man’s shirt, which is usu-
ally bigger and made from lon-
ger-lasting fabric.
High-end products are no ex-
ception. Manufacturers of scents
charge less for men’s cologne
than they do for ladies’ perfume
— even though the ingredients
are the same. Women’s plus-
sized clothing costs more than
the regular sizes. If you think
it’s because more fabric is used,
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cost about the same as the small-
er sizes.
It’s easy to see for yourself.
Researchers for Mic.com sam-
pled a handful of common drug-
store products. They found pink
razors for $12.49, while blue ra-
zors from the same brand ran just
$10.99. Women’s deodorant was
$4.99. Men’s, only $3.29. And
even though Excedrin Complete
Menstrual contains the same
ingredients as Excedrin Extra
Strength, that “M” word costs
half a buck extra for the same size
bottle.
Twenty years ago, California
did a study that uncovered lots of
this gendered pricing, leading to
a statute that outlawed the prac-
tice. But no other states followed
suit, so women in the other 49
could be stuck paying more.
There’s one bit of good news.
Before the Affordable Care Act,
health insurance companies could
and did charge women more for
the exact same coverage men got.
And not because of maternity
coverage — that often wasn’t in-
cluded in the policies at all. When
Obamacare passed, sex discrimi-
nation in health insurance pricing
became illegal.
But the pink tax is still very
much alive. A nickel here and
50 cents there adds up to over a
thousand bucks a year for the typ-
ical female shopper. And that’s
real money.
Martha Burk is the director
of the Corporate Accountability
Project for the National Council
of Women’s Organizations. Dis-
tributed by OtherWords.org.
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Fed Shouldn’t Be Discussing Interest Rate Hikes
The case for
black workers
W ILLIAM S PRIGGS
The recently released
minutes of the last
meeting of the Federal
Reserve Board’s Open
Market Committee re-
vealed there was seri-
ous discussion of the
fact the labor market
still showed signs of weakness.
A primary issue was the lack of
evidence of strong wage growth,
which would be a clear signal the
labor market was tightening.
This has unleashed the Wall
Street bettors, who want a jump
on the Fed’s changing monetary
policy, giving them more active
play on the bond market, where
interest rate movements can fuel
their gambling addiction.
The voices being raised to have
the Fed raise interest rates march
out lots of theory to predict uncon-
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slowdown, falling oil and natural
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We must hope that the Fed makes
policy based on what is good for the
economy, not what is good for the
reckless gamblers on Wall Street.
The current directive to the Fed
comes from the Humphrey-Haw-
kins Act, which in 1978 estab-
lished that the nation’s primary
economic policy is to achieve full
employment, within reason -- not
by creating unsustainable budget
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Unfortunately, many have
twisted the legislation’s purpose
to their own ends, changing the
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act’s intent to balance budgets and
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those policies don’t increase un-
employment. The act does not
place full employment on
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strains full-employment
policy to a measure of pru-
dence.
With that in mind, the
Fed should understand it
is not at full employment.
In addition to wages rising with
productivity, a main tenant of ev-
idence of full employment, the
Fed needs to embrace some addi-
tional senses of full employment.
African Americans, and that these
circumstances will persist no mat-
ter what the level of unemploy-
ment.
Of course, many economists
do appreciate that this pat answer
is hard to reconcile with the great
sensitivity that the black unem-
ployment rate has to the economy
-- a tightening labor market brings
down the black unemployment
rate at twice the rate for whites.
That makes the structural argu-
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There is another key element.
The unemployment rate gaps
between blacks and whites are
stubborn at every education lev-
The unemployment rate
gaps between blacks and whites
are stubborn at every education
level, and the gaps are glaring.
One is that discrimination would
disappear, since it would become
prohibitively costly in a full-em-
ployment economy.
A problem for the Fed is that
there is little diversity in its staff-
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of diversity among economists.
Economists have convinced them-
selves there is little to explain
about the persistence of the dis-
parity in black and white unem-
ployment rates, the ratio of which
remains stubbornly at 2-to-1. It is
enough to assume there are lower
skill levels among African Ameri-
cans and societal structural issues
that permanently disadvantage
el, and the gaps are glaring. In
fact, what the unemployment
rate gaps suggest is the old ad-
age that blacks must be twice
as good to compete in the la-
bor market with whites. The
unemployment rate for African
Americans with more education
is similar to that of whites with
less education. This is true for
blacks at all education levels,
from college graduates to associ-
ate degree holders to high school
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to argue that those huge gaps do
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When the labor market tanks,
and the number of unemployed
workers per job opening goes up,
the gaps faced by better educated
blacks to less educated whites get
wider. Black college graduates
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ment rates closer to white high
school graduates, and blacks with
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with unemployment rates worse
than white high school dropouts.
When the labor market tight-
ens, unemployment rates for
blacks with more education im-
prove such that they are better
than those of less educated whites,
though still off the mark compared
with equally educated whites.
When employers are faced with
two unemployed working people
for each job opening, many stop
seeing color and start seeing qual-
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a growing economy and smaller
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cost to discriminate by passing
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can applicant.
We don’t know what would
happen if the nation maintained its
commitment to full employment,
because just as the black unemploy-
ment rates near parity with whites,
our economic policy switches all re-
verse to slow the economy, increase
unemployment and push blacks off
the path to equality.
The Fed needs to see that its
policies are part of that problem.
Slowing the economy before we
reach full employment means em-
ployers never have to raise wages
nor understand the costs of their
discriminatory practices.
William Spriggs is chief econo-
mist for the AFL-CIO and a pro-
fessor in the Department of Eco-
nomics at Howard University.