Wall Street has been occupied by those representing the 99%. But what about the top 1%? How do they fare? They might be throwing cakes at the hungry masses down below, but how do they share their pies? They might be unleashing atrocities upon the huge majority of people through criminal manipulations, but how fairly do they treat each other?

A look at their annual salaries points to crucial factors of inequality and biases within the top 1% themselves. The masculine, patriarchal and sexist nature of corporate greed duly relegates its women accomplices to the inferior salary brackets. No matter if the women are in the same ranks of CEOs or Presidents, they are just paid way less. In fact, the highest paid woman Safra A. Catz (President, Oracle Corp.) earns less than any of the first 12 highest paid men! And the second highest paid woman Wellington J. Denahan-Norris (COO, Annaly Capital Management) earns less than any of the top 25 highest paid male executives.

The cumulative total earning for the first 9 months of last year was $381,105,205 for the highest paid male executives, while the cumulative total earning for the highest paid female executives for the said period was $118,233,692.

When such disparities in pay across genders have been normalized within the top echelon, it is no wonder the financial bosses of the Wall Street do not think twice about the increasing class society afflicting America today.

Here, then, is the breakdown (first 9-month period, 2010) -

Top 5 Men

Philippe P. Dauman
President and Chief Executive Officer
Viacom, Inc. (VIAB)
2010 Total Compensation: $84,469,515

Mark V. Hurd
President
Oracle Corp. (ORCL)
2010 Total Compensation: $78,362,540

Lawrence J. Ellison
Chief Executive Officer
Oracle Corp. (ORCL)
2010 Total Compensation: $77,556,015

Ray R. Irani
Executive Chairman
Occidental Petroleum Corp. (OXY)
2010 Total Compensation: $76,107,010

Thomas E. Dooley
Chief Operating Officer
Viacom, Inc. (VIAB)
2010 Total Compensation: $64,610,125

Top 5 Women

1. Safra A. Catz
President and Chief Financial Officer
Oracle Corp. (ORCL)
2010 Total Compensation: $42,095,887

2. Wellington J. Denahan-Norris
Vice Chairman, Chief Investment Officer and Chief Operating Officer
Annaly Capital Management, Inc. (NLY)
2010 Total Compensation: $23,634,800

3. Carol Meyrowitz
Chief Executive Officer
TJX Companies, Inc. (TJX)
2010 Total Compensation: $19,252,740

4. Susan M. Ivey
Former Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer
Reynolds American, Inc. (RAI)
2010 Total Compensation: $16,823,900

5. Marina Armstrong
Senior Vice President and General Manager
Gymboree Corp. (GYMB)
2010 Total Compensation: $16,426,365

Sources: Equilar & CNN Money.

Occupy Wall Street and Slut Walk NYC

I’m a feminist because I believe in equality based on gender.
I’m a feminist because I believe that no one has the right to touch you without your consent.
I’m a feminist because I believe that all women should have free and unfettered access to reproductive health care and abortion services.
I’m a feminist because I believe women deserve equal pay for equal work.
I’m a feminist because I believe that women should be able to wear what they want to wear without fear of being assaulted or harassed in the street.
I’m a feminist because I believe that when a woman is sexually harassed or sexually assaulted, we should be asking what the perpetrator was doing or wearing so we can catch him, not what the woman was doing or wearing, so we can blame her for inviting it.
I’m a sex-positive feminist because I believe that sex and sexuality is not the problem, lack of consent is the problem. Clothing is not consent. Consent is consent. The only person responsible for a rape, or for sexual harassment, is the rapist or the sexual harasser.

I’m a feminist because I have faith that once we individually and collectively harness our feminine energy sufficient to offset the pure masculine ethos of the unregulated corporate person, with its unlimited billionaire underwritten speech—we will get back to a relatively lush, safe and sane America where we all share in the beauty of the commons and we all share the costs of maintaining our general welfare.

My name is Jack Tuckner; I’m the co-founder of Tuckner Sipser, a women’s rights/employee rights law firm in NYC, and I want to talk about two significant and related protest gatherings that occurred simultaneously in NYC on October 1, One was SlutWalk NYC, and the other was Occupy Wall Street, but they’re both really protesting the same pathologies afflicting our body politic.

The “Slut Walk” started in Toronto when a cop told a group of female university students to “not dress like sluts in order to avoid being victimized.” This victim-blaming mentality catalyzed a long overdue movement, as sexual violence and sexual harassment are still widespread in our culture and have been for far too long.

In our Rape culture, the rapist/harasser/assaulter fails to control his own impulse to molest, violate, humiliate, harass and/or abuse a female subordinate, for example, or a woman walking down the street, or date who is raped, because he feels little to no empathy, respect or equality between himself and his target object; like Wall Street’s Ayn Randian view of living in perfect selfishness, the rapist is a sociopath, he seeks only his own gratification, and sees his victim as an object, as other, as less than, so her pain, fear, shame, or death is of no consequence to him.

Now take Wall Street culture, part and parcel of Rape culture, only on the Street, the faceless rape “victim” is the poor, the weak, the young, the old, the sick, the middle class; the female, almost all us, really—99% of us, in fact.

In Rape culture, the male cannot or will not reign in his sexual and/or gender- conflicted impulses, so he acts them out on each woman who comes within his destructive path, and in the Wall Street (rape) culture, the boys continue to rape, pillage and plunder Main Street while its enablers victim-blame teachers, cops, fire fighters, factory workers, students, Medicare recipients, immigrants, the EPA; seniors and the unemployed whose benefits are running out–these are the victims that Wall Street blames–the greedy, needy $40,000 per year worker trying to pay her bills, never mind the 2 billion dollar per year hedge fund manager who pays way less percentage of his “earnings” into the common coffer than the rest of us poor folk.

Rape culture and Wall Street culture are symptoms of Male Privilege run amok. No Yin, All Yang. All brain and balls; no heart and no soul.

As women’s rights advocates, we support Occupy Wall Street, as well as drastic changes to our criminal crony corporate culture. Women should not have to face deep cuts to the Women, Infant and Children nutrition program to cut down on low infant birth weights, so that another American company can join the other 18,000 companies incorporated in the same building in the Cayman islands to avoid paying federal taxes to help our country pay its bills. Is that patriotic?

And kids shouldn’t be kicked out of Head Start programs, and young people shouldn’t have to give up their Pell Grants and therefore college, so that the million dollar an hour hedge fund manager who wrecked the economy on purpose can continue to pay a 15% marginal tax rate on his “capital gains” cause he skims other people’s money for a living. And we can’t let these hoods in Congress get away with vilifying, scamming, investigating and destroying Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading sexual and reproductive health care provider, just because they take care of our American girls and women. Shame on those bastards.

Social, economic and gender injustice affects and poisons everything. Look at this bleak landscape we’re living in—and the reason is simple—the billionaires and giant transnational corporations increasingly own and control our commons, and they own the elected leaders through the use of 37,000 highly paid lobbyists in Washington, yet they steadfastly refuse to join us in the fight to keep the jobs in America, to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure by investing in this country they profess to love. Wall Streeters and the politicians they own are stingy, greedy, selfish, small-minded and mean-spirited, and they’re dumb too, as they apparently aspire to living filthy rich in a poor country.

As corporations are now “persons” under the Supreme Court’s grotesque 2010 ruling, yet we still can’t get the Equal Rights Amendment for women passed into law, let’s never forget that first and foremost, we must vigilantly strive to raise the status of women while lowering the status of corporations, if economic, social and gender justice is our goal.

What is most noteworthy is the fact that in the three most respected professional fields – law, medicine and business – women are treated most abysmally. Despite the stringent manners of admissions into professional schools that awards degrees in these coveted areas of expertise, and the accompanying social status that identifies virtues of honesty and integrity with these specializations, it so appears – from the latest US Department of Labour statistics – that the most esteemed professional fields are also the most exploitative ones as well. At least so far as gender inequality is concerned.

In legal occupations, American women earn 56 cents per dollar that the men earn. Legal professions include the jobs of lawyers, judges, magistrates, other judicial workers, paralegals, legal assistants, and miscellaneous legal support workers. Likewise, in the medical profession, among the physicians and surgeons, women earn 64 cents per dollar the men earn. Third highest hall of shame is reserved for business management executives. Female financial managers earn 66 cents per dollar their male counterparts earn and women human resources managers earn 69 cents per dollar.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women still lag far behind men in almost all the industries. The inequality exists most clearly for instance among physicians and surgeons (women $1,228, men $1,914), loan counsellors (women $754, men $1,118), purchasing managers (women earn $1,029 weekly, men earn $1,383), claims adjusters, investigators (women $845, men $1,128), computer programmers (women $1,182, men $1,267), lawyers (women $1,449, men $1,934), postsecondary teachers (women $1,030, men $1,342), retail salespersons (women $443, men $624), real estate brokers (women $745, men $939), inspectors, testers (women $513, men $754), financial services sales agents (women $798, men $1,237), etc.

Among several hundreds of jobs that were surveyed, women were found to be earning slightly more than the men only in the fields of bartending and baking.

As we begin the Women’s History Month, the above serve as timely reminders as to how the history needs to be revisited and radical feminist movements be reintroduced.

There’s no question that his advertisement is discriminatory under federal law, and it’s hard to believe anyone would try to defend it with a straight face without sounding like Nathan Thurm, the nervous, sweating, chain smoking lawyer played by Martin Short on SNL.

    A Bona Fide Occupational Qualification (BFOQ) is a defense to acknowledged discrimination under basic civil rights laws, where an employer is permitted to discriminate against an employee on the basis of religion, sex, national origin or age in those instances where those protected statuses are a “bona fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of the particular business or enterprise.” 

    On a case by case basis, to determine if a discriminatory policy constitutes a BFOQ, first look at the particular job in question and what it requires to perform it.  Then look to the discriminatory policy and determine if it is necessary to performing that job.  For example, airline pilots are prohibited from serving as captain after reaching the age of 60.  This discriminatory rule is based on the reasonable notion that a pilot’s skills deteriorate with age, and that the safety of the passengers depend most essentially on the captain.    Yet, if a 60 year old pilot is working as a flight engineer, for example, he could not be fired for this reason, as age is not a BFOQ for that position.  This exception also holds true for French restaurants hiring exclusively French-born chefs, for example, but would fail if used to support the failure to hire a non-French janitor, as it’s not “reasonably necessary” to the authenticity of the restaurant.  Similarly, a religious school may discriminate in its hiring decisions regarding its faculty, limiting acceptable religious beliefs to the school’s denomination, but it may not do so with its secretarial hiring decisions, as whether the secretary is Catholic or not has no connection to the integrity of its Catholic identity.

    The employer must prove “plainly and unmistakably” that the admitted discriminatory policy, such as only hiring male “housepersons” meets the terms and spirit of this narrow BFOQ exception to our civil rights statutes.  An employer  must demonstrate (and ultimately prove in court) that its discriminatory practice is “reasonably related” to an essential operation of its business, which is often a common sense analysis, such as, whether a men’s clothing manufacturer would be permitted to advertise to hire only male models (it would). 

    In the case of this advertised housekeeping position, not only isn’t there a reasonable relationship between the job description given and the male gender of the applicant, there isn’t even an rationale, articulable basis to argue for such a counter-intuitive and just plain silly and obvious sex discriminatory advertisement.  I’m sure the real reason is something as mundane, typical, customary and sad as the owner’s strong preference for hiring only men. 

Most of us are still blissfully, ignorantly unaware, as our free press is mostly anything but free, corporate-owned and under contract, that the US Supreme Court changed the world as we know it at the beginning of this year. In Citizens United, the five majority, right-wing, corporatist crazies voted to grant corporations personhood, free-speech rights and the unrestricted opportunity to inject billions of dollars into the body politic, throwing their overbearing financial weight behind politicians who will support corporate greed over the needs of we the people and the commons we all share. The decision was a huge victory for Wall Street banks, big oil, the “health” insurance industry and other transnational corporations and the billionaires who run them, and a huge defeat for the rest of us, as well as the for the planet itself. A true travesty.

What does corporate money and influence buy? Everything, of course. Just last week, the heavily business lobbied Senate Republicans unanimously voted against a measure that would have finally help address pay discrimination against women in the workplace. The Paycheck Fairness Act passed the House of Representatives nearly two years ago, but it can’t seem to gain traction with those Senate boys (don’t they like and respect their own wives, daughters and mothers?) despite the consistent polls showing that over 84% of Americans support equal pay for women, our elected GOPers won’t even let the bill come up for a discussion, let alone a debate. They all sided, yet again, with the Chamber of Commerce, because if they paid women the same as they paid men, there would be less money remaining for seven figure CEO bonuses. This despite the fact that women with identical education, experience and qualifications make only 77 cents on the dollar of what men make. Over the course of a 40-year career, it’s estimated that women lose out on upwards of a million dollars in total wages due to this discrimination, and the Senate and Chamber of Commerce want it to continue that way.

“School Lunches? Eat Fucking Tree Bark… Reaganomics, Ladies and Gentlemen, Reaganomics.” Richard Belzer, Catch a Rising Star, circa 1984

The U.S Department of Agriculture also recently reported that 17.4 million American households had trouble finding enough food to eat last year. That’s 1 out of every 8 homes–someone went hungry at some point throughout the year. Children in single parent households were most affected by this food shortage–all in all–14% of the households in our country experienced hunger. And these numbers could have been much higher–the Department of Agriculture reports that although the number of hungry families shot up much higher in 2007 when the recession began, it has held steady since, thanks in large part to federal programs like the supplemental nutritional assistance program and free and reduced school lunches. Moreover, economists have proven that federal food assistance programs actually have a stimulative effect on the program. Every dollar given out in food stamps produces a $1.73 in economic activity as it circulates from the hungry person to the retail stores to the wholesaler to the farmer. And yet Republicans still insist that a 3% tax cut for millionaires and billionaires, so that they can then put more money in foreign banks, is a better stimulus for America, and they are willing to cut food assistance programs to pay for it. As Thom Hartmann characterized this maddening fact; “There you have it, the Republican Party literally taking food off the table of hungry Americans, so fat cat banksters can get a million dollar tax giveaway bonus, borrowed from China and handed to those billionaires, courtesy of you and me by the Republican Party.”

Obama administration must be commended for its newly announced support for the Paycheck Fairness Act (S. 182). This bill – a much needed update to the Equal Pay Act of 1963 – would take steps toward finally closing the wage gap between men and women by closing loopholes in the current law and strengthening weak remedies. Passage of the bill is one of the recommendations made by the administration’s Equal Pay Enforcement Task Force.
 
The Paycheck Fairness Act would provide workers with the tools they need to ensure equal compensation, including fair remedies, additional enforcement tools and technical assistance and training for both employers and employees. Last year, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Paycheck Fairness Act; the bill currently has 40 co-sponsors in the Senate and is poised for passage.

Here is the statement by the President –

In America today, women make up half of the workforce, and two-thirds of American families with children rely on a woman’s wages as a significant portion of their families’ income.
Yet, even in 2010, women make only 77 cents for every dollar that men earn. The gap is even more significant for working women of color, and it affects women across all education levels. As Vice President Biden and the Middle Class Task Force will discuss today, this is not just a question of fairness for hard-working women. Paycheck discrimination hurts families who lose out on badly needed income. And with so many families depending on women’s wages, it hurts the American economy as a whole. In difficult economic times like these, we simply cannot afford this discriminatory burden.
My Administration has already begun to address this problem. In my first week in office, I signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which helps women who face wage discrimination recover their lost wages, and in my State of the Union Address, I promised to crack down on violations of equal pay laws. Today the Equal Pay Enforcement Task Force will present its recommendations, which include ways to better coordinate among enforcement agencies and inform employees about their rights. These steps support women, and they also support businesses that are doing the right thing and paying their employees what they deserve.
We cannot do this work alone. So today, I thank the House for its work on this issue and encourage the Senate to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, a common-sense bill that will help ensure that men and women who do equal work receive the equal pay that they and their families deserve. Passing this bill is one of the Task Force’s key recommendations, and I hope Congress will act swiftly so that I can sign it into law.

On Monday, the jury had found Novartis liable for gender discrimination in pay, promotions and pregnancy-related matters. “Today’s punitive damage award is meant to punish the company for its past actions and to deter it and others from continuing to discriminate against female employees in the future,” said Sanford Wittels & Heisler LLP.

Twelve former Novartis sales representatives were awarded $3.36 million in compensatory damages on Tuesday

World’s largest retailer is about to face the largest class action suit in American history. Status quo of Walmart Stores Inc., thus far maintained through several expensive public relations campaigns and television advertorials, has been challenged by this lawsuit representing interests of more than 1 million women. In a case that will unveil the extent to which corporate America has institutionalized systemic sexism, Walmart and its likes will most likely demand a review, an appeal or shameless dismissal.

Women Challenge Wal-Mart

Indeed, Walmart has no shame. Its official statement is irresponsible and unrealistically far from the ground: “We do not believe the claims….Walmart is an excellent place for women to work and fosters female leadership among our associates and in the larger business world.”

In its defense, Walmart has clearly taken shelter within the ideology of market capitalism pervading the “larger business world” – a genre of trade policies that has resulted in enormous costs to human dignity, labor and unity. Capitalistic “free” market economy in America has consistently been anti-worker, especially, anti-women. Despite countless judicial interventions and feministic endeavors to ensure equality at workplaces, corporate America continues to treat women workers as invisible and their labor unworthy of rewards. As a result, women in 2010 still earn about 79 cents for every dollar men earn. For women of color, it is way less.

As the most prolific representative of global capitalism, Walmart has an extraordinary share in maintaining existing gender inequalities. Walmart has $405 billion in annual sales, 2 million employees, more than 8,400 stores. Between the Waltons (Christy, Jim, Alice, Robson), personal assets of the owners of Walmart run over $80 billion – the richest private wealth accumulation ever in the world.

From time to time, corporations like Walmart (and Sam’s Club which it owns) have hired more women and workers from various minorities groups. But this is usually done in order to enhance profits through cheaper labor standards. Ironically, thus emancipated class – women and other minorities – prove to be the instruments for higher profits of the unregulated corporations.

After hiring cheaper alternatives in the form of women and members of minorities in their native country of operations, corporations like Walmart then globalize their exploitative expansions for even cheaper labor alternatives to maximize profits. So in Mexico, Walmart becomes Walmex, in the UK, it is Asda, in Japan, it becomes Seiyu and in India it is Best Price. Walmart successfully hires cheaper labors also in China, Argentina, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Canada, among others.

A crucial way of challenging anti-worker policies of Walmart and its likes, is for the workers to join labor unions. And this is one area where the Walton families have excelled in choking human liberties. Walmart has consistently maintained anti-union stances, exposed employees to health hazards, locked in night-shift workers and paid employees below minimum wage. With the forced absence of workers unions, Walmart has ensured that workers get paid below poverty line minimum wage to maintain families and yet have no right to challenge it in an organized manner. And most famously, Wal-mart has opposed the pro-worker Employee Free Choice Act.

The working class of the world needs for this lawsuit to prevail, not merely to send a signal to a corporation that undervalues its employees, but also to encourage all workers to join in solidarity to radically challenge and upstage profiteering monopolists everywhere.

By Kiri Blakeley, FORBES
You can take time off for health or child care issues, but where’s the corporate understanding about work disruption due to relationship turmoil?

When news broke that Sandra Bullock’s husband, Jesse James, was allegedly having an affair with a tattooed biker model, Bullock pulled out of the London premiere of her Oscar-winning movie, The Blind Side. A premiere without a film’s star might as well not be a premiere, so the studio kiboshed the entire thing. As the cheating scandal widened, Bullock canceled several other overseas premieres and an appearance on the Kids Choice Awards.

Media appearances, press junkets and premieres are generally not optional for a celebrity–they are often contractually obligated or, at the very least, considered a necessary part of the job.

Bullock is fortunate that not only does her studio, Warner Brothers, seem to be supportive of her time off, but she is also a big enough star that she’s in no danger of being rendered unemployable in the future over her ditched duties. A less bankable actor would likely not have had the same option.

And what about us average wage slaves? While it is generally acceptable in the workplace to take time off due to health reasons, child care issues, or the well-being of a parent, there is often scant corporate understanding when it comes to work disruption as a result of divorce, breakup or even general relationship turmoil.

Walking into your boss’ office and saying you’d like to take a few days off because your mother is sick (something I did in the past year) is a little different from saying you need to come to terms with the idea that your husband is schtupping a series of bimbos. Should this kind of time off be more widely available and acceptable?

Mental health experts seem divided over the issue. Irina Firstein, a New York City therapist with 20 years’ experience, says that relationship trouble should not be given the same leeway in the workplace as health issues. “These events, while very traumatic, don’t require a long time off work,” she says. “In fact, I think it is most helpful to try and continue your usual activities. This takes away some of the focus and energy on obsessively dwelling on one’s pain.”

Taking the opposite tack is Sally Wright, Ph.D., a consultant for clients like the American Psychotherapy Association, who says, “Situations involving relationship breakup are every bit as mentally and emotionally taxing as those which are characterized as ‘acceptable’ reasons. In fact they are often more difficult to deal with.”

Yet there persists the corporate and societal bias that relationship issues are not “serious,” despite reams of research indicating that divorce is on par with death in terms of emotional devastation. The Family Medical Leave Act covers certain employees whose parents or children are ill, but those suffering emotional woes take their chances when going up against an employer.

Labor attorney Jack Tuckner, who specializes in women’s rights in the workplace, represented a 26-year-old New York City woman who was fired from her company after taking nearly a month off work after her live-in boyfriend abruptly dumped her. “[The company] called her ‘weak-minded,’” says Tuckner, who settled the woman’s case.

Tuckner advises those who may need to take time off due to personal issues be honest but vague with your employer (don’t divulge all the dirty details), give your boss a time-line of when you plan to return to work (two to three weeks off is about as much as one can reasonably expect), and to document your emotional state through a doctor or mental health professional. Even then, he warns, you still risk being marginalized at work after such a leave of absence.

But perhaps the tide is shifting. The human rights laws in some states and cities require that employers must accommodate reasonable requests due to mental anxiety, and those laws are beginning to be interpreted more broadly. “Mental suffering is getting closer to being a covered disability,” says Pryor Cashman labor attorney Josh Zuckerberg. But emotional distress isn’t protected in the clear-cut way that, say, blindness is.

However, there are decent compromises that employers can make to allow employees to regain emotional footing while not being forced into the role of emotional hand-holder. Heather Gatley, who oversees human resources for staffing firm AlphaStaff, says she has seen an increase in companies that offer personal time off (PTO)–to be taken for whatever reasons, no explanation necessary–in place of sick days or vacation time. Says Gately: “It’s unreasonable to expect that employees won’t need time off every once in awhile to attend to personal issues–whether renewing a driver’s license or nurturing a broken heart.”

Still, says Gately, even employers who offer PTO can require that those who want to take advantage of it give notice “as far in advance as is possible.” Unfortunately, one can never quite plan when you may discover your spouse or partner is a cheating low life.

Kiri Blakeley is a writer who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her book, Can’t Think Straight: A Memoir of Mixed-Up Love, will be published in January 2011.