Question about "Equal Pay" laws:
 

I'd prefer to keep this out of PARF because I do not consider it political. I just have an honest question for anyone who might know about U.S. employment law. Is it illegal to not offer equal pay for equal work, as long as it's not based on ethnicity or gender?

And I'm sorry if it's a really dumb question but I don't know the answer. IOW, can an employer pay different people different amounts who do essentially the same job based on subjective criteria? Such as the employer thinks that one person represents his company better than another person, (employee)? Can they do this secretly, i.e. w/o the lesser paid employee finding out?

TIA. :cool:

I mean, obviously people get raises over other people and all that, so I don't understand what the law really is.

Yeah I hate paying stupid people too.

Isn't that the definition of D-O-E? Depends on Experience?

If you want to start everyone off at the same, there's a suggestion for that: Minimum Wage.

I think you have a misunderstanding of the "Equal Pay for Equal Work Laws." They were passed, initially, in 1963 to end pay discrimination against women and they cannot be separated from gender, religion, or ethnicity. The legislation was never intended to require an employer to pay every employee the exact same amount for doing the same type of work. Obvious case in point, teachers whose salaries range widely for doing the same work--the differences being based on background training, education, and experience.

I have virtually no understanding of the law, as clearly stated in my OP. Being the lazy guy that I am, I'm researching it by asking here where someone who knows the law can explain it to me. Beats doing a lot of searching and reading. :)

I wish they had the internet back when I was in school.

In general employers are allowed to contract with employees in any way that is mutually agreeable, and the employer may discriminate on any basis that is not prohibited. These are called protected classes - race, color, sex, religion, nation of natural origin, and for people over 40 yeas old - age.

In other words, an employer can advertise that it hires only tall people and pays bonuses for everyone over 6 feet, or they hire only skinny people, or only people who listen to 60s acid rock, or whatever. But an employer cannot base pay or working conditions on the employee's races, sex, color, nation of national origon, or age after 40. You can segregate the people on the factory floor and give them work assignments based on height, but you can't give the women a certain type of job and the guys different jobs, unless the employee's sex is a bona fide qualification - like cleaning the woman's shower room. That's clearly acceptable to reserve for male employees, right? Some companies have jobs that are known informally as women's jobs, and others are open in practice only to men. Often one or the other job pays more, but there's no reason why one job or the other should be a "woman's" job. That's an equal pay issue. Essentially, there are millions of factors that go into the wages and working conditions of any given employee, but their pay and working conditions cannot be dependent on any of the protected classes - race, sex, etc.

Actually, not to put too fine of a point on it, but my height example is bad because men are taller on average than women. So unless you did a regression analysis to have the same reward for women at the same percentile in height as the men, you would be inadvertenly discriminating in favor of men through what is known as disperate impact. To avoid that but still discriminate legally based on height, you would have to match the height of the men only against other men and women against other women. So a 5'10" woman would compare to a 6'6" man, and should be paid equally.

I have long advocated for compensation systems based on height (taller being higher compensated, so to speak) but I haven't gotten anyone to go for it yet.

I think the word "secretly" is the tripping point here. Of course other's pay is none of anyone's business, but an audit would sort that out. In CA, that audit can be carried out by the CA Employment Development Dept. (EDD) if there is a claim for pay discrimination.

As far as the "secretly" part goes, employers cannot prohibit employees from comparing compesation and working conditions or fringe benefits. Many employers have policies claiming that pay is private and threatening to punish workers who compare their pay with other workers, but that is illegal. Comparing pay and working conditions is a fundamental right of employees and is fundamental to their right to organize. So no, the employer can't keep its pay scale secret, but the employees don't have to share that information, either. It's up to the various employees if they want to share and compare their salaries.

Employers can absolutely play favorites and pay one person more than the other just because they like one better than the other or because one "represents" the company better. This only becomes a problem when the people who are favored tend to have a certain look, such as blond and blue-eyed, and the people who aren't recognized as representing the company quite as well are all darker or speak with funny accents, despite having the same duties and the same performance evaluation scores.

If the employer plays favorites because one of the workers is a kiss ass, that's legal. If the employer favors a worker because she's blond and has big tits, and openly disses the fat black woman who types twice as fast and covers twice the assignment level, then you have a problem. If all the "girls" in the organization work in clerical jobs while all the "boys" do the manual labor and managerial work at higher pay, you have a problem. If the ability to lift 25 pounds repetetively is a bona fide requirement for the position, then it's not illegal for most of the emplyees to be men because more men than women will be able to fullfill that bona fide occupational qualification. But if the job really doesn't require more than a five pound repetetive weight tolerance, then it would be discrimination to require the ability to lift 25 pouinds, since screening for people who can lift 25 pounds repetetively will in effect result in you screening by sex, and highering only men. That's called a pretext.

Make sense?

Since I learned the law from Speeder's Dad, I'm giving him a free pass for doing his research by asking people on the forum if they know. If he was really serious about the question he knows he can call me. If he's just musing about the possibilities and giving a friend idle advice, an open-ended question to the PPOT brain trust is in order. Soon Dueller and the other real professionals will chime in and fill in the details.

Who needs Westlaw when you have the OT forum?

Actually taller people make more money now.

Taller People Earn More Money | LiveScience

Shorter people should get the compensation ..... ;)

Thank you, Mike! That's better info than I was expecting but I appreciate it. And who needs Westlaw, indeed! My sister works there and my cousin is her boss. Everyone's boss, actually. I wonder if she's reaping the fruits of nepotism or maybe he got her for the "family discount". Lol...

This is one of the reasons I got into commissioned sales. Sure, you could get along with some customers better than other sales people would because of whatever reason. But the bottom line is we all make the same base salary and then commission is a clearly defined scale based on revenue and sales production. Plenty of gays, blacks and women here do way better than I do. And maybe those qualities make them better fits in their sales territories than this straight white guy would be. We all have equal pay scales according to performance. It's just that some perform better than others.

The size of the business has a LOT to do with it. If you are talking about a small business with a handful of employees the boss can pay at about any rate he wants. Many family businesses seem to have the bosses kid employed and making a ton more than the other truly productive employees.

my workplace did it. they hired two new respiratory therapists. both graduated at the same time, but one started working before the other and had TWO MONTHS experience working PRN, meaning he had worked maybe 10 whole shifts at the other facility. they paid the guy with the 'experience' $24/hour and the gal with none $19/hour. frankly, the gal is much better at the job in every way. things were dandy right up until the guy let slip how much he was making. then things hit the fan.

...which is why employers don't want employees sharing that info. OTOH, the Free Market disciples would say "tough *****, that's what she agreed to, she should have negotiated better"

For every dollar a man makes, a woman makes .70, which isn't fair; the guy is only left with .30.

she said "tough $4!&." left, immediately had a job elsewhere, and left a gaping hole in the night schedule, which they were only able to fill with a competent person after about 4 months. plus, it left a bad taste in the mouth of the whole department. now, we all know where we stand.

i've spoken with her since, and her story is that she did negotiate, but they wouldn't back down at all and she needed a job, so she took it. which is fine. but when she found out how lopsided the compensation was and they refused to even listen to her, she was DONE and left. which is also fine. they lost a good employee and then spent about $10K trying to get a decent replacement (which makes me smile, actually, because that is how it is done by our administration), due to the fact that they then hired about three different people, payed to train them, then let them go because they couldn't cut it. then, they ended up hiring another guy and had to pay him more than $25/hour because he has 20 years experience. :D

@nynor, Wow. That makes no sense at all from the employer's standpoint and unless they own the company, I would think they'd have to answer to someone for being so stupid and wasteful.

I've run a small business and paid people different wages for the same job description but it's absolutely based on performance. I've also asked them all not to discuss their pay with the others, (not enforceable, I know), because all it will do is make someone butt hurt.

A decent upper management would realize that the $5/hour difference they said no to would have paid for 2000 hours towards that $10,000 they spent replacing her. Of course, lower management, I'm sure, spun it differently to upper management to make it seem like they did the company a favor.

:)

LOL! that was straight from the CCO and CEO. middle management, my boss, had no say in the matter. they've lost at least 70% of their employees in the last year. something on the order of 20+ nurses, 4 RT's, and quite a few CNA's. they don't give a $4!7. there are only about two nurses that i work with in the HOU (high observation unit, think: stepdown ICU) that were there when i started four years ago. and one of them was still a CNA at that time.

SO.... to answer the OP, yes, i do believe it is legal. however, doing so may have unintended consequences. and people talk. as for our situation, like i stated above, all of us in the respiratory department know exactly where it stands and nearly all of us are looking for something else, actively.