In the private sector, it is very difficult to know whether you are being paid fairly, and although someone may strongly suspect it, proving it is nearly impossible. Employees at any level above minimum wage are required to sign a statement when hired that they will not disclose their salary and can be fired for cause if they do. People take this very seriously. It is the strongest reason for the continuation of the “glass ceiling;” that companies dare not allow women to rise above the level where male professionals would report to them because when they do so, the women usually find out that they are being far paid less than their subordinates. The glass ceiling is clearly set exactly at the level where women never have a subordinate except low level and clerical employees, or women are put in advisory positions, off to the side of the organizational chart where they have high status, but few people directly reporting to them. The glass ceiling, unequal pay, and pay secrecy are all part of the same cycle: you cannot underpay women if they know what the going rate for their job is, so you cannot promote them to a place where they will know what their colleagues in the same company are paid.
I have a proposal that would be hard for companies to fight, at least openly. Companies that insist they need privacy in salaries, but claim that it is not a cover for discrimination can have the privacy they claim they need while companies that truly believe they do not discriminate can be protected from frivolous lawsuits that are raised long after the act:
If companies want to be able to put a short (180 day) deadline on lawsuits for pay discrimination, then they have to disclose their salary schedules to all their employees, including management salaries. The only exception to this would be the owner’s salaries in closely held companies. These would be called “Open Salary Companies.”
If they want to keep their salary schedules private, then the deadline for filing a discrimination lawsuit goes to ten years. These would be called “Negotiated Salary Companies.”
The company would have a seven month deadline after passage of the act to make the choice of whether they want to be an “Open Salary Company” or a “Negotiated Salary Company,” and the choice would have to be made public. Their choice would be posted on the wall in their human resources office, listed in their SEC filings, noted in their annual report, and included on the job application every time someone applies to work there.
Either publish your salaries, and be protected by a short deadline, or don’t publish your salaries and the deadline is ten years. The company gets to make a choice, but they have to make a choice. There would be a seven month period after passage for a company to decide. Because under this Ledbetter vs. Goodyear decision, they cannot be sued for anything that happened more than six months ago, and further, because it is already established that laws cannot be retroactive, the companies would be mostly protected from suits if their open salaries showed women and minorities making less than their counterparts. This might be upsetting to people who want to sue for past discrimination, but the Supreme Court already made this ruling, and nothing we do now can change it retroactively. The companies who choose to be open would have seven months to start examining their salaries and make them right. In practical terms, it would mean any "Open" companies would be very careful about making any promotions or salary changes in that first year after they start publishing their salary schedules, but that would not affect the women and minorities they were not going to promote anyway.
If it is an Open Salary Company, then the posting has to state clearly how the employee finds out how much people in that company are paid. This cannot be simply people in their own job description, because clearly, any company can define job descriptions narrowly if they want to keep people in the dark. The salaries posted have to include all compensation, including at least the range of potential bonuses for that job, and the method of establishing commissions, so that companies cannot hide disparities by providing the same salary but disparate bonus opportunities and commission ratios. The salaries must be able to be viewed without the permission or knowledge of the HR staff. It can be placed on a wall in a public place, disseminated to all employees, put on the web, or put in a book that can be viewed privately.
If it is a Negotiated Salary Company, then the company must notify the employee in writing each time it gives a raise, a promotion, or hires someone the date of the employment action, the step that the employee should take if they believe that they have been treated unfairly based on their race or gender (any internal review procedure), and the date ten years hence by which the employee must file an action with the EEOC if they believe that they have been unfairly discriminated against.
A company can change its status between an Open Salary Company and a Negotiated Salary Company at any time, on seven months written notice to all its current employees.
Companies will complain they need the privacy to negotiate and without it, their business will fall apart. Funny, I think that was what feared in the 16th century, when the price tag was first invented by Quaker businesspeople as a means of treating all customers fairly. I think the world has accepted the ability to do business in spite of the existence of visible pricetags.
If you do this, the glass ceiling will become as permeable as a hologram, because women and minorities will know whether they are getting cheated, and companies will have no reason to keep women down where the only salaries they know are their own and those of the lowest clerical workers. Companies that claim they need privacy can have it, so long as they understand that they will be subject to equal opportunity claims far longer.
This does not have to be hard.
