Women, Work, and Wages Equal Pay for Jobs of Equal Value (1981) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 1-12
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 1... ...
Women who are nurses libranans, government employees, and clerical workers have assessed their skills and the requirements of their jobs and have argued that their jobs are underpaid relative to jobs of ' Job c~aIuation systems typically arc used to order jobs hie~rchimlly on the basis of Judgments regarding their relative skill, effort, responsibility, etc., and on this basis to group them for pay purposes. For a description of formal job evaluation systems, see Chapter 4 and also the committee's intenm report to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (Trciman, 1979)
|
From page 2... ...
In 1971 librarians at the University of California found that they were in the lowest of the university's 25 nonteaching academic pay series and that their salaries were about 25 percent lower than the salaries of those in comparable nonteaching academic positions filled mainly by men (Galloway and Archuleta, 1978~. In San Francisco, employees of the city and the county compared the pay rates of classes of jobs held mainly by men with the pay rates of classes of jobs held mainly by women.
|
From page 3... ...
Examples include a number of cases brought by the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, alleging that electrical manufacturing companies had put jobs held exclusively by women into lower pay grades than jobs held exclusively by men. even when the jobs were judged to be of equal value on the basis of the companies' own job evaluation plans that were used as the principal bases of pay differentiation within the companies (see the discussion in Chapter 3~.
|
From page 4... ...
of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as amended, prohibits discrimination because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in all employment practices, including hiring, Snag, promotion, compensation, and other terms, privileges, and conditions of employments The 2 TIC Equal Pay Act states (29 U.S.C.
|
From page 5... ...
even though no member of the opposite sex holds an equal but higher paying job, provided that the challenged wage rate is not exempted under the Equal Pay Actors affirmative defenses as to wage differentials attributable to seniority, meet, quantity or quality of production, or any other factor other than sex" (SyIlabus, - At. Me Court made no explicit judgment regarding the validity of theconcept of comparable worth as a basis for assessing pay equity between jobs, noting that such a judgment was not relevant to the dispute.
|
From page 6... ...
. and ensure the application to all workers of the principle of equal remuneration for men and women workers for work of equal value.,' Great Britain's 1970 Equal Employment Opportunity Act provides for equal remuneration for men and women employed in "like work" or "work of same or a broadly similar nature'' or "work rated as equivalent.
|
From page 7... ...
THE ISSUES mining the relative ~ orth of In this context the committee interprets the charge from the EEOC to stud, the validity of compensation systems and methods for deter jobs as requiring an investigation of whether and to what extent existing pay differences between jobs are the result of discrimination. '~e language of both the American Equal Pay Act and the Canadian Equal Pay and Equal Opportunity Lax derives from principles used in job evaluation.
|
From page 8... ...
As noted in the committee's interim report (Treiman, 1979) , most job evaluation plans, which provide the bases for many employers' compensation programs, use market wage rates to determine the value of features they identify as contributing to job worth (typically, skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions)
|
From page 9... ...
One tripe of wage discrimination occurs when one class of people Is paid less than another class for doing exactly or substantially the same job: for example, male and female machine assemblers (or truck drivers, secretaries, elementary school teachers, professors, etc.) working side by side' doing jobs that are essentially indistinguishable from one another, producing similar results.
|
From page 10... ...
Because employers use many different job evaluation plans, because the economic circumstances of employers and industnes differ, and because we do not believe that there is a hierarchy of job worth that could or should be applied to the entire economy, we look only at the comparable worth approach as it could be used to adjust the pay rates of jobs within individual firrns.~° ~ It is of interest to note, however, that there is a general consistency. although not an czact correspondence, in the relative pay rates of jobs in different societies (Trciman, 1977;108 111)
|
From page 11... ...
in order to interpret the findings and to identify features of labor market operations that may account for the unexplained portion of wage differentials. Next we assess Jealous approaches and procedures for formally evaluating the worth of jobs and suggest some procedures that hold promise for identifying and reducing bias where it exists in job worth scores and in wage rates.
|
From page 12... ...
Second, job worth scores are highly dependent on the choice of compensable features and the weights assigned to them; since most job evaluation plans use market wage rates to establish factor weights, the weights will incorporate the effects of any discrimination that exists in market wages. Third, many employers use different plans for different sectors of their firms (for example, one plan for plant jobs and another for office jobs)
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.