In Defense of Pay Equity
By Albert B. Kelly
Today’s generation, with social media such as Facebook and
Twitter, shares quite a lot of information. I say this, because I was raised in
a generation where you were taught to be careful what information you shared
because it might be used against you. That idea- meaning that information will
be used against you- seems to be the case when it comes to issues like pay and
salary.
That’s why I hope that, whoever the new governor happens to
be after tomorrow, he or she might reconsider signing Assembly Bill 3480
(Senate version S-2536), which would prohibit employers from asking about or using
an applicant’s pay history to determine salary during the hiring process. This
bill came before our current Governor back in July and he vetoed it.
You might ask why this is important and that is a fair
question, for an answer you need look no further than the fact that women in
New Jersey earn roughly 80 cents for every dollar a man earns. If you throw
race and ethnicity into that mix, Hispanic women earn approximately 45 cents
for every dollar a white male makes and as far as African-American women, the
rate is roughly 60 cents to every dollar.
On a fundamental level, such systemic inequality runs
against our sense of what is fair and right as Americans because,
qualifications and skills being pretty much the same, people regardless of
gender, race, or ethnicity should be paid roughly the same but that doesn’t
happen if the yardstick becomes past pay.
If the applicant’s past salary history becomes the baseline
for a current offer, a history that saw the applicant earn anywhere from 20 to
30 cents less than their male counterparts, then a prospective employer will be
making an offer with inequality already baked into the cake and that’s how pay
inequality becomes systemic and passed on through many generations.
In such cases, offers will not genuinely reflect the
position itself nor will it reflect work experience, education, etc., but it
will merely reflect the bias or prejudice of past employers at best and worst, it
will reflect the bias of previous generations where society believed that men
were the bread winners and women stayed home and cooked and kept house. We all
know that ship sailed a long time ago.
More than that, we live in a day when the majority of single
parent households nationwide (about 83%) are headed by women and in New Jersey,
77% of single-parent households are headed by women. So pay inequality, no
matter how it’s perpetuated, is impacting countless numbers of children and
this will have a profound impact on our state, not to mention the nation, for
generations to come.
There might be an argument to be made by some, that knowing
the pay history is only for the most benevolent of reasons but I’m not buying.
The love of money or profits, is the root of all evil and in this case, knowing
the past salary history is a way to peg an offer to a past that’s always had
women earning less than their male counterparts for the same jobs.
The same case can be made for younger workers, older workers
re-entering the workforce and after the 2009 recession, everyone who attempted
to scratch out a living in the gig economy. That’s why a number of states and
cities including, Massachusetts, California, Pennsylvania, and Washington DC;
along with New Orleans and San Francisco have passed or are considering passing
such legislation banning employers from requiring applicants to provide past
salary history.
Critics also contend that having such information allows
employers to gather information about competitive wages in their corner of the
labor market. That might be true, but there are other ways to obtain data
within any given industry or market without requiring applicants to reveal this
information if they choose not to do so.
This is an important issue for women in New Jersey, but it’s
also an important issue for families in general. Previously I mentioned
single-parent households run by women and the impact to that type family
structure, yet the majority of male-female income households require 2 incomes.
Addressing pay equity is part of preserving that slice of the middle class as
well.
Dealing pay equity is the right thing to do and if banning
questions about salary history helps get us there, I will be encouraging our
new governor to sign this legislation into law.