Are Women Not Even Responsible For Their Work Choices?

17/5/00

"Thousands of part-time workers have been granted back-dated pension rights in a European court ruling that is expected to cost British business up to £17bn.

... Because so many part-time workers are women, employers who excluded such staff from their pension schemes were found guilty of sex discrimination under European law." The Independent

Most of the 60,000 part-timers who will benefit from this ruling are teachers, health workers, employees of local government and banking staff. They will be allowed to extend their claims back to 1976!

Now, changing a law so that it applies retrospectively, and punishing people who complied with the law as it stood before, is not normally deemed to be acceptable. It is a strong principle of law - and of justice - that governments cannot simply make new laws and punish people as if they had broken them - when they couldn't possibly have done because they did not exist!

And it should not be tolerated.

Imagine that the government decided that the maximum UK speed limit for cars should be 60mph, and that the limit of 70mph had been 'wrong' for the past 20 years. Would we consider it right that everyone who had exceeded 60mph in the past 20 years should be punished with a fine for each occurrence of having done this? Of course not. It would be a complete corruption of any decent notion of justice to do such a thing.

When it comes to benefiting groups of women, however, the corruption of decent notions of justice has become the norm.

Let us not pretend that this European decision is justified because, somehow, it helps the poor and the needy. It doesn't. Here's a quote from The Guardian.

"The National Union of Teachers said a typical teacher with 25 years' service who worked part time for 12 years of that time, retiring on a salary of £24,000, would [as a result of this European decision] get £1,800 a year additional pension and an extra £5,400 lump sum." The Guardian.

The European decision is NOT based on need or on alleviating poverty, it is based purely on politically-correct, feminist-influenced notions of what constitutes sex discrimination. Thus, if a law somehow appears to disadvantage a group of people, well, that's all right, but if, within this group, there are more women than men, then it's not all right.

Men, however, can be disadvantaged at all times. And sex discrimination laws just do not come into it

Look at prison reforms, changes to criminal law, sentencing policies. These affect more men than women, and they are often extremely disadvantageous to the men concerned. But do you ever hear outcries of sex-discrimination on the grounds that such things affect more men adversely than women?

What about no-fault divorces? Given that these are initiated mostly by women, aren't these sex-discriminatory against men?

What about the laws relating to custody of the children? Don't these adversely affect more men than women? Aren't these, therefore, sex-discriminatory laws?

What about the ways in which sex-discriminatory policies have disadvantaged males when it comes to their health (men die five years earlier than women) their education (boys are not catered for as well as girls in the educational system) and their retirement (see below).

Let's not make any bones about it. Sex-discrimination laws are not about equality. They are about discriminating against men in favour of women, at all levels, and in every sphere of life, on all fronts, and they are about removing any responsibility that women have for their own actions.

Men are responsible for everything that they do, but women are to be treated as superior citizens

Men are responsible for everything that they do, but women are to be treated as superior citizens who are entitled to privileges and benefits because of their gender alone.

They are to be treated like spoilt little children - pampered constantly with regard to their wishes - with the justice and legal systems completely corrupted and debased to help them succeed with their selfish claims and their demands without the requisite merit; and also absolved from having to take responsibility for their actions or for their lack of them.

It's not my fault. It's not my responsibility. These are the cries of women today.

When they kill their children or their partners, they are mostly not held responsible.

When they bear children - something over which they have 100% control - men have to share their responsibility, even if they were hoodwinked into the pregnancy and even if they were below the age of consent at the time.

When there is domestic violence in the home, the fault is not theirs.

When they claim abuse or assault against a man, no real evidence is required before the law takes action. They can remain anonymous and they are protected from full and proper questioning in the courtroom.

When the marriage beaks down, they are likely to get the house and the children, even if the breakdown was caused entirely by their own actions, or even simply the result of their own whims.

And, in this particular case, having reaped all the benefits of the part-time employment which they freely CHOSE to take up, the law has now determined that they should be retrospectively compensated even further.

No-one forced them to take the jobs.

But women who took on part-time work knew what their contracts entailed. No-one forced them to sign the contracts. No-one forced them to take the jobs.

In many cases, these part-timers were paid higher hourly rates precisely because their jobs were only part time. And many women took these jobs because of the flexible hours that went with them. Many men would have loved to have had such jobs, but they didn't take them on because they needed to support their families. They wanted pensions and they wanted to work full time.

The pension funds of full-time employees who work for companies, rather than for government, are also being caught out RETROSPECTIVELY by the new ruling. They will be squeezed in order to pay for this magnificent handout. And so the pensions of all full-time employees will have to be reduced.

the pensions of all full-time employees will have to be reduced.

Businesses and companies are going to have to pay out the equivalent of huge fines as if they had been breaking the law for all of this time.

Further, according to Ruth Lea from the Institute of Directors, the complications for companies involved in backtracking through two decades of employment histories in order to calculate and sort out the back payments will cost a further fortune.

And why are the corporations and the government going to hand out back-payments to part-time workers on behalf of everyone else?

Not because there is something special about part-time workers, but SOLELY because they are mostly women.

This is the basis for the European court's decision.

Take also the recent case of the speech therapists who won massive awards on the grounds of sex discrimination. Here's The Independent.

"The health service is to pay 351 speech therapists £12m to settle one of the longest-running sex-discrimination cases in legal history.

... Payments of up to £70,000 each will be made in back pay to the female speech therapists, who have fought for 15 years for equality with the male-dominated professions of clinical psychology and pharmacy.

... Senior NHS managers have acknowledged that the deal could cost the service millions more as the pay of the most senior therapists increases. The status of the top specialists will be raised to match that of other health professionals, allowing them to double their earnings to £60,000 a year." The Independent.

Speech therapists have simply ripped off the NHS for millions of pounds.

No-one would object to people being paid the same rate for an equivalent job. That is not the argument. Simply notice that if speech therapy had been a male-dominated profession, or even if it had contained equal numbers of men and women, then the sex discrimination laws would not have been applied.

Isn't this ludicrous?

No-one forced these women to go into speech therapy.

So, are women now not even responsible for their career decisions and for the paths that they CHOOSE to take? Have they no minds of their own? Must we always compensate women who make 'financial errors of judgement' by choosing easier and more flexible jobs? Must we always pander to the cries of 'unfair sex discrimination' wherever women CHOOSE to congregate, and whatever they CHOOSE to do? And must we yet again corrupt our justice system, in this case by applying laws retrospectively, in order to appease the selfish feminist lobby?

Take a look again at some of the issues mentioned above in blue. Do you ever hear from the European courts that the laws regarding these issues are 'sex-discriminatory'?

No, you do not.

03/10/03

Look at this! ...

UK Two pensioners lost the right to claim unfair dismissal and redundancy pay yesterday ... Under the Employment Rights Act 1996, men and women over the age of 65 have no right to claim unfair dismissal or redundancy payments. Mr Rutherford and Mr Bentley argued that this contravened European equal-treatment laws by discriminating against men. That was because the number of men working over 65 was twice the number of women, so men were more likely to be affected by the age limit on claims.

But they lost.

In other words, as I pointed out above, when men make up the majority of the disadvantaged, the so-called 'equal-treatment' laws do not count

What is so outrageous about this ruling is that if it had been the case that more women than men were actually working over the age of 65, then the court would have had to rule in the women's favour.

But because it is men, mostly, who are negatively affected by the law, the court is not required to rule in their favour.

But, perhaps, the most disgusting aspect of this whole area of law has been the deceitful way in which it is has been sold to the people for the past three decades.

When people hear about laws designed to combat unfair gender 'discrimination', they think, "Well, this sounds like a good idea. After all, it is unfair to discriminate against people on the basis of their gender."

What they do not realise, however, is that, for the most part, these laws are specifically designed to allow for discrimination against men.

As such, they are not 'anti-discrimination' laws at all. And they should not be described as such.

They are, in practice, anti-men laws - giving groups, organisations and policy makers the right to discriminate against men.

Also see, ...

A Permanent Gender War?