COLUMN LEFT/ HARRY BERNSTEIN : Closing the Wage Gap: Job Equality : Despite some gains in women’s pay, the idea of ‘comparable worth’ languishes.

President Clinton helped the cause of women’s rights by appointing Janet Reno, Donna Shalala, Hazel O’Leary and Carol Browner to his Cabinet. He did the cause another service by naming the dynamic Hillary Rodham Clinton to head the task force created to reform our miserable health-delivery system.

There are equally talented men he could have named, but the symbolism of selecting those and other women for high government posts is an important message in what is still a rather sexist society.

However, the President could do something far more than symbolic to advance women’s rights by leading a fight for much-needed comparable-worth legislation, a valuable concept seldom talked about these days.

Despite some economic gains in recent years, women still earn much less than men, whether they are working at identical jobs or comparable ones.

That distressing fact affects the entire economy and almost every woman and man, from the lowest-paid farm worker to rich movie stars.

There are more devastating problems of discrimination, especially against African-Americans, Latinos and other abused minorities. But economic discrimination against women should not be as difficult to battle.

We’ve long recognized how unfair it is to pay a woman less than a man when both do identical jobs. In trying to resolve that problem, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, and wisely prohibited employers from reducing men’s wages to make them equal to women’s.

But the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has done little to enforce the law. Many employers comply voluntarily--though often only because of pressure from women, unions and the threat of legal action.

Even before the Reagan and Bush administrations, the law was neglected; it is less useful today.

Rigorous enforcement of the 30-year-old law requiring equal pay for equal work should be a priority of the Clinton Administration. More important, we must start dealing seriously at the national level with a much more difficult problem: paying women the same as men when they do work that is comparable in value.

The “comparable worth” concept seemed to be growing in popularity in the 1970s, when there was talk of a national law. Now the idea is rarely mentioned.

More is being done at the state level. Some states have pay-equity laws, though they are relatively weak and apply almost exclusively to public employees. Still, as a result of those laws, there has been some equalization of pay between men and women doing different jobs of comparable worth.

Minnesota is making significant progress, but no area has done as comprehensive a job as the Canadian province of Ontario, which requires all public and private employers to study wage inequities between men and women, and then eliminate those inequities.

Even where there are state laws, they are difficult to enforce. It has to be proved that the lower pay for women is based on sex, not on ability, seniority or some other factor.

The basic idea of comparable worth seems unclear to many. It’s pretty simple. Example: Is the average cafeteria worker’s job in a school, usually filled by a woman, less valuable than that of a male custodian? The answer appears obvious, but it took a lengthy, expensive court battle in just one case to get the female cafeteria worker and the male custodian’s wages equalized--without cutting his wages. The problem is that the state laws do not explicitly define the standards for equality.

It isn’t easy to make job comparisons, but it can be done by using a single yardstick to measure the skill, effort, education, responsibility and working conditions of the jobs involved. And workers should join management in making those comparisons.

Women have been catching up with men in wages and now earn about 70% of their male counterparts, compared with about 60% a decade ago. At that rate, it will take another 30 years to erase such wage discrimination--and then only if men’s wages continue to decline: 40% of the wage gap reduction was due to the decline in men’s wages, not an increase in women’s earning power.

Clinton is in a position to speed the process. His appointments of women have helped, but he can do much more by making comparable-worth legislation a high priority. It will take time to implement, but for the sake of all of us, men and women, let’s start on it now.