Equal Pay

Monday night, Governor Jindal of Louisiana signed the Louisiana Equal Pay for Women Act into law, an important step forward toward achieving equal pay for the women of Louisiana. 

The Act resembles the federal Equal Pay Act. It bans discriminatory pay based on sex, with exceptions for differences bases on seniority systems, merit systems, and systems that measure earnings by quantity or quality of production. It also provides an exception for differences based on "a bona fide factor other than sex," with clear requirements that the employer must show that the factor is related to the job and that there are no alternative practices that would serve the same business purpose. By limiting the "bona fide factor other than sex" defense, the Louisiana Act avoids creating potential loopholes for employers to assert defenses so broad that they may themselves be based on sex (such as prior salary history or stronger salary negotiation skills).  Read more »

In yesterday’s 5-3 Supreme Court decision in American Express Company v. Italian Colors Restaurant, the Court held that it was just fine to enforce a contract requiring merchants to arbitrate their claims and waiving their rights to come together to challenge the contract’s terms in federal court. Never mind that as a result of the Court’s decision, the merchants’ legal claims against Amex under the federal antitrust laws are dead on arrival, without any determination of their merits ever being made. This is because the expense of proving their claims is totally unaffordable for the individual merchant, and only becomes affordable when spread across the class of those who were allegedly harmed. 

While this case arose in the consumer context, no doubt some will argue that it gives courts free rein to enforce arbitration clauses with class-action waivers in employment contracts as well, despite the recent holding by the National Labor Relations Board (more on this below) to the contrary. 

Here’s what happened: Italian Colors, a small restaurant, brought a class action on behalf of itself and other merchants alleging that behemoth Amex used its monopoly power in the corporate charge card market to force merchants to agree to pay 30% higher fees than they pay for accepting other credit cards. The total damages a merchant might have recovered in this case were a significant amount: $38K. But the total cost to that same plaintiff of presenting the economic analysis (central to practically every antitrust case) to establish a violation of the antitrust laws would have run from a few hundred thousand to one million dollars. That’s roughly 10 to 25 times more than the potential recovery to an individual merchant. 

Taking on this expense would be, as Justice Kagan noted in her dissent, “a fool’s errand” for an individual business. Read more »

Something may be rotten at Performance Food Group. 

This week, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced a major lawsuit against a national food distributor for pattern or practice gender discrimination. According to the complaint, Performance Food Group (PFG) has a long history of refusing to hire women for several "operative positions" at its distribution facilities. The EEOC alleges that women have been systematically excluded from warehouse jobs like driver, forklift operator, mechanic, meat packer, and many others. 

The complaint details blatant and pervasive discrimination throughout the company, where gender discrimination was standard operating procedure in hiring decisions. High-ranking company officials openly declared their preference for male employees, stating that women were not capable of warehouse work and pressuring supervisors to fire their female employees. According to the complaint, one vice president asked, "Why would we ever waste our time bringing in females?" And a warehouse selector told a female applicant point-blank that the company "would not hire female drivers."  Read more »

Image source:Beartooth NBC

There are a lot of different metrics used to rank the states and the District of Columbia. Geographic size, population, and various economic measures are particularly popular. Naturally, I’m sure you’ve wondered how Montana, or “The Treasure State,” compares to all of the other states. Well, Montana is big: it is ranked 4th in geographic size. It doesn’t have too many people, though, and it ranks near the bottom on population metrics: it is 44th in population and 48th in population density. Unfortunately, Montana also ranks near the bottom of all the states, and the District of Columbia, based on its wage gap. Data compiled by the National Women’s Law Center places Montana 43rd in the wage gap rankings: women in the state earn 74.6 cents for every dollar earned by their white, non-Hispanic male counterparts.

On the 50th Anniversary of the Equal Pay Act, Montana Governor Steve Bullock decided to tackle the wage gap problem head on by creating the Equal Pay for Equal Work Task Force to determine whether there is inequality in pay for women. Montana has an impressive history of advocating for women: Montana women earned the right to vote in 1914, six years before the Nineteenth Amendment was passed, and the first woman ever elected to Congress, Jeannette Rankin, hailed from “Big Sky Country.” Read more »

All too often, pay discrimination goes undetected because employers maintain policies that punish employees who dare try to inquire about their salary. These punitive pay secrecy policies mean that employees could be fired, demoted, or otherwise penalized simply for trying to inquire about wages. Unfortunately, research has shown that nearly half of private sector employees believe they will be punished if they dare talk about their wages. 

This week Congresswomen DeLauro tried to do something about these unfair policies. She offered an amendment that would have meant that defense contractors could not retaliate against workers who try to share or inquire about salary information. Who would disagree with that? Well, apparently the House Rules Committee did. Read more »

This might be difficult, but try, for a minute, to imagine Congress as a group of artisans – glass blowers, perhaps – who must use their breath to shape the world we live in. Actually, that shouldn’t be too difficult. They may not be artistically inclined (or maybe they are) but obviously, Congress is in the business of shaping our lives through debate (aka their breath) and legislative action.

Today marks the 50^th Anniversary of the Equal Pay Act, yet Congress has apparently forgotten the importance of using its power for positive change. Read more »

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act, giving us the opportunity to look back on what it took to get that landmark law in place, and what it will take to finish the unfinished business of achieving fair pay. 

Efforts to end the practice of paying women less than men for work in the same job have been underway for a very long time — well over a hundred years, in fact. The 41st Congress passed an appropriations bill in 1870 — 1870! — that prohibited gender pay discrimination in federal jobs. Unfortunately, by the time it got to the Senate, it was severely watered down and only applied to new employees. Enforcement of this bill was virtually non-existent. 

Even back then, the injustice of paying women less than men for work in the same job had support amongst women's rights advocates and even some mainstream press outlets. For example, in 1891 the Washington Post optimistically declared, "The working world is rapidly coming to apprehend the justice of giving equal remuneration to women who do as much and as good work as men."  Read more »

Too many managers today still bring a 1950s mindset to the 21st century workplace. In the 50s and early 60s, shows like Leave it to Beaver taught Americans that “a woman’s place is in the home and I guess as long she’s in the home she might as well be in the kitchen.” Seriously, that comes straight from the mouth of The Beav and Wally’s dad. Check it out:

In fact, the ‘men bring home the bacon/women fry it up in the pan’ trope wasn’t even true in 1963 when the Equal Pay Act became law – 37% of women were in the labor force back then. (Coincidentally 1963 is the same year that Leave it to Beaver’s run ended.)

But it wasn’t until the 1970s that women in professional jobs were shown on t.v. When Mary Rhodes (a.k.a. Mary Tyler Moore) found out she was being paid A LOT less than her male predecessor in her t.v. news producer’s job, she was furious. She confronted her boss, Lou. He admitted Mary was better at her job than the guy paid more, but tried to justify his higher salary on the grounds that he had a family to support. Mary told Lou: by that logic you’d be paying single guys less too, but you don’t! Mary was quick on her feet. Read more »

Today’s release of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) jobs data for May brought familiar news: 175,000 jobs were added to the economy and the overall unemployment rate held pretty steady, creeping up a smidge to 7.6 percent. Women gained almost half of last month’s jobs (82,000 jobs) and adult women’s unemployment rate fell to 6.5 percent in May – the lowest level since January 2009.

While these job gains are welcome, don’t pour the champagne just yet – these kinds of numbers aren’t enough to jumpstart the recovery for the millions of Americans who are unemployed – or the new workers graduating this month.

Here are some numbers from today’s NWLC analysis:

• 2022: As I mentioned above, 175,000 jobs added last month – that’s pretty close to the average monthly gain over the last six months. But, at this pace, it will take until 2022 to close the jobs gap, according to estimates by the Hamilton Project. They define the “jobs gap” as the number of jobs the U.S. needs to add to return to pre-recession employment levels when you account for people who are currently unemployed, as well as those who will join the economy as the population grows. So while 175,000 is pretty good, we’re going to need to add a lot more jobs each month to speed up the recovery – nine years is too long to wait for a full recovery.

“That’ll be $4.35.”

As I raced to the National Press Club from Starbucks, I wondered how many chai chargers the wage gap would cover. For those who don’t know what a chai charger is, it’s a chai latte with espresso, and about twenty of them just got me through finals week. For those who don’t know what the wage gap is, it’s the average difference in pay between men and women in equivalent positions. That gap currently comes in at 23 cents on the dollar, or $11,000 a year, on average.

“Only women are asked to ‘lean in,’” Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro said through her blue eye shadow and geometrically wondrous glasses. Rushing in from the House floor, DeLauro delivered the keynote speech at the NWLC’s panel celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act. DeLauro pressed for three policy changes to close the gap: equal pay, access to paid leave, and expanding access to childcare.

Joy-Ann Reid, a contributor to MSNBC and managing editor of theGrio, monitored an engaging panel, which featured Ai-jen Poo from Caring Across Generations and the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Hilary Shelton of the NAACP, Fatima Goss Graves of the NWLC, and AnnMarie Duchon, Associate Director of Accommodation Services at UMass Amherst. AnnMarie described her seven- year fight to close her wage gap. Read more »