The Incentive in Equality podcast follows the current and past pay gap as it relates to professional women’s soccer. The pay gap was at 59% in 1963 when the first Equal Pay Act was passed. The current pay in women’s soccer is 35% of what the men’s team earns in regular national games and even more significant for major tournaments like the World Cup at 7.5%. Wages in women’s soccer have been steadily increasing for years since the creation of the Women’s World Cup in 1991, and we have seen the U.S. Women’s National team win four of them. Despite the rise of viewership, sponsorships, and support, the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) has a wage cap of $41,460, similar to that of a teacher’s salary even though the league includes world-renowned players. 

This podcast includes interviews from Hope Fredrick, Fort Lewis College Assistant Head Coach of the Women’s Soccer team and former professional soccer player, and Heather Otter, a Region 9 Economic Developer. Fredrick brought insight into the world of women’s soccer, and how, even though she knew the pay was never going to be significant and had experienced it along with unbalanced support, she would choose to play professionally again because she loves the game. Otter provided information on the logistical side of the pay gap and how it persists because of male-minded leadership and culture. 

This topic is incredibly important in today’s political climate because when the USWNT, currently the most successful women’s team in the world, can be paid equally, it opens the door for all women to be treated and paid equally. 

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The Future of Labor

The future of labor has been hanging over our heads for decades. When automation was changing factory work and when the living cost was rising out of tandem with minimum wage, we watched as the workforce changed and we adapted the best way we knew how. We cut down on our living costs, we worked multiple jobs, and we laid out hope that one day companies would decide to reinvest into the population. Largely this is what we are still doing; waiting for the market to change for us.

As we see a trend we realize that this won’t happen without initiative from individuals. Throughout the world, people are becoming advocates for themselves and others. Workers are standing up for themselves, fighting against the injustices they face brought upon them by employers and their government. In France, workers stage pension strikes, in Germany, Amazon workers strike for better pay, and teachers around the world are fighting for higher wages. Today workers are willing to strike and unionize because we have seen success through these methods in the past. 

Throughout this project, we looked into past labor issues like the railroad strike, laws legalizing equal pay and unionization, and I think a lot of us came to the conclusion that often times history repeats. 
Even though unionizing is legal today, companies can frown upon it, intimidate against it and find loopholes around it. We’ve seen this in how gig economies work by mislabeling an employee in order to withhold benefits and by using ‘tips’ as a way around a stable salary. We found that a lot of the time, corporations consider profit to be more important than equality.

We also noticed in the past that when a group of people know they are not being treated fairly, they band together to enact change, which is something we sorely need if we want to positively impact our future economy aka don’t want to all be living in debt. 

We started our research focusing on the industrial revolution and studied how labor movements actually started when people realized they didn’t want to work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. This turned into people working 0 hours a day, every day of the week when unemployment surged. Fast forward a few hundred years and people had no work due to completely different problems such as the shift in automation.

During the automation shift in America, GM Motors was one of the companies most talked about. In the transition, 30,000 jobs were lost and 77 factories were closed. This happened all around the country and is something we have to look forward to with the projection that 47% of American jobs will change with this new age of technology. There was a promise in automation that the new jobs created would make up for the jobs lost, but there’s no way to regulate where companies are going to give their jobs.

The new jobs companies claim will be created aren’t usually for the people that lost their jobs, but are instead for people willing to work in poor conditions for poor pay. This comes in the form of outsourcing; employing immigrants or people living in poverty that don’t always have the right or capacity to fight for fair conditions and pay. But even getting a job doesn’t guarantee that you are going to be able to sustain yourself financially. With the changing economy, the cost of living has increased while the minimum wage hasn’t. Real wages have actually decreased by 1.3% since 2017, taking into account the cost of living and inflation.

For a child and adult in Colorado, you need to make $29/hour to support yourself and your child. This is what leads to the middle class slowly disappearing while the gap between the lower and upper class expands because middle-class families aren’t earning enough to keep themselves out of poverty. The pay gap becomes more and more complicated the more factors we add; industry, gender, race, and nationality all coming into play in how much you make. 

This is the reality of the economy today. This is the reality of the future of labor. In order to be prepared for the future, initiative needs to be taken. We need to be fighting for our rights by not allowing corporations to take advantage of loopholes in laws and by supporting the right to unionize. Schools need to be preparing students to be flexible in the future job market, and businesses and organizations should be reinvesting into workers’ experience and education to make them hireable.
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The future change of the job market is inevitable, but our acceptance of it doesn’t have to be.