Can't fathers get a break?

Fathers should get special treatment according to Zippy Catholic:

But as some kind of categorical employment imperative backed by the force of law, the concept of equal pay for equal work is fundamentally inhuman and immoral. There is a basic difference between treating people as human beings with inherent dignity and treating them as interchangeable fungible productivity units, despite how amusing it is to say "fungible productivity unit".

I understand the objections: it is presently illegal to hire and set pay based on marital status and children, it is difficult to get employers to do the right thing, if fathers are morally entitled to greater pay - a living wage - than those who do not have the garnering of a living wage as their natural duty, well, capitalism as presently consitituted is going to lock fathers out of the workplace, fragment jobs into contract work and piecemeal jobs, and hire the cheapest workers. I get all that. 

Whatever problems fathers face in the marketplace do not justify imposing a belief that fathers are entitled to more pay than their labor is worth. There are many things that have caused a drop in wages that may or may not be hitting fathers hard, but none of them are tied to the concept of equal pay for equal work. While I agree with Zippy Catholic that there should be no legal mandate for equal pay for equal work, as a concept, it is reasonably sound. It is an effective principle that takes the edge off of the natural tendency that most people have toward favoritism, especially in ways that may harm an employer.

Zippy Catholic did not at all make the moral case for why fathers are entitled to anything higher than the maximum value of their labor. I suppose this is a conservative version of the typical nebulous Catholic arguments, (very) loosely based on scripture, that support no shortage of "moral mandates" on participants in economic transactions of every variety.

Now, my heretical intuition (aka Protestant philosophy of sola scriptura) suggests that there is something awry with having an automatic bias to any group. Lo and behold, the Bible agrees with me, not Zippy Catholic. Deuteronomy 25 states:

13 Do not have two differing weights in your bag"one heavy, one light. 14 Do not have two differing measures in your house"one large, one small. 15 You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you. 16 For the LORD your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.

This only deals with buying and selling, but it makes a reasonable starting point for discussion of an employee's wages. It is reasonable to assume that anyone who isn't a father would be furious if they found out that their wages were artificially lowered because they weren't a father. Knowing the way that virtually all employers are hush-hush about their employees' wages, it is reasonable to assume that this bias would have to be kept quiet, especially around young, single men. The moment that most young men realized that they had to work longer, harder hours than their married male coworkers simply because they weren't fathers would be the moment that they'd put their resumes out at a dozen competitors. Deception would have to be the foundation of this policy, and that deception is what is at the heart of Deuteronomy 25. That it is an ostensibly noble cause is irrelevant.

I can feel already that some might object to my use of Deuteronomy 25 on the grounds that allowing employees to negotiate higher wages for "unfair reasons" is unbiblical. The Bible does not prohibit negotiating a better price, even one that is flat out discriminatory to others because the seller prefers one buyer over another. What it prohibits is negotiating dishonestly, where a buyer is deceived into paying more than he or she should. As I said, Zippy Catholic's idea would be a nonstarter in the workplace without deception by Human Resources, therefore it can be reasonably said to run contrary to Deuteronomy 25.

**UPDATE**: I had ignored some of the rhetoric about "fungible productivity units" simply because I thought that that was more of a side issue for Zippy. Apparently I was wrong, based on this comment he posted in defense of his position after being roasted by most of the commenters up until that comment:

Hospitals, for example, don't hire fathers or mothers. They hire
doctors, nurses, administrators, and technicians -- who might or might
not be fathers or mothers. The hospital staff are paid for the job they
do, not for the children they have or don't have at home.

Right, I understand, and it is precisely that to which I object.
What I am suggesting is that hiring 'functional units' as opposed to
human beings is immoral.

For someone who seethes at the rhetoric and positions of modern liberalism, this is an awfully left-wing view to take. It remains to be explained why an employer would want to hire a "human being" as opposed to a INSERT_JOB_TITLE. Why would my employer want to take me on "as a human being," instead of as a Software Engineer? Would it really be to their advantage, and to my peace of mind, to have that much involvement in my life from my employer?

There is a fine line here of freedom for employees that Zippy Catholic has clearly missed. The more involved the employer becomes with the "human being,"  and not the "employee" (as though these are two separate categories!) the more they will encroach on the employee's life. This approach would invariably lead an employer to become more controlling, more paternalistic in its employees' lives.