Equal Pay

I am going to get serious tonight. I have been reading and hearing a lot about the pay differentials between men and women in the work place and I want to get up on my soup box and throw my experience and opinion into the mix. For those of you who don't know, I worked for several years as a Human Resources Manager/Director. The two companies I worked for were extremely different from each other. One had a great pay structure for employees, the other was definitely lacking. Just as a note of interest, I am not going to discuss management pay tonight, as that is a different ball game all together!

The first company I worked in HR for was a factory in Cleveland, OH. There were approximately 125 employees I was in charge of for the day to day Human Resources duties, including setting and approving raises. Out of these 125 employees, there were 6 female employees who were considered hourly employees. The average rate for these 6 women was $7.50 per hour. Out of the 119 men, the average hourly pay was about $8.25 per hour. I certainly picked up on this point while going over the numbers and I went to the accounting department to inquire about the difference in average hourly pay. The Accounting Manager, though not extremely helpful, said It was due to the positions these people worked in, i.e. the women were primarily welders, the men were actually operating heavy machinery and building tools and dies for these machines. I asked, however, why aren't the women running the machines, the answer was, "Well, one or two do sometimes, but they don't want to run the machines. They are afraid of getting dirty". (Insert guffaw from him here) Taking it as I was getting dismissed from this exchange, I spent the next week or so asking around, talking to the women to see what they thought. Each one of those 6 women had asked at one time or another to work at one of the presses and each time, another man was chosen over them. Another interesting fact I found was the men who did welding as well, just like the women, were making between $0.50 and $0.75 more, doing the same job! Why??? Again, when I went to solve this mystery, I was simply given a lame excuse and dismissed. The bad thing was, and I didn't even realize this until I had been laid off and was looking for a new job, even my own pay was much lower than others in my profession and $40,000 less per year than my predecessor, who was a man. I didn't even realize! I felt so taken advantage of and even sick to my stomach about it. Long story short, this was a real situation, a true story, and the exact same tricks are being played across this nation. There are, however, fairer ways of doing this...

After moving and settling to New York, I took a job at a hotel who was managed by a national brand. The pay structure of this employer was based on seniority and position. Every employee who did the same position was paid the same rate, which was based on the rates of our competitors who based their rates on us. (Does that make sense to you? It's complicated, I know) There were no random raises, no manager "favorites" getting a quarter here or there and every single increase had to be approved by the Supervisor up to the President of the company who was in Houston, TX and ran 40 hotels nationwide. In this case, even the management team of the hotel was paid on a scale that again, was competitive with hotels around us.

What I want to do with this tonight is to make people realize that these news stories and reports which have come out recently are absolutely true and may even be happening in your company or job. Stand up and talk about it. Share your ideas on how to make it fair. Did you know in most cases women pay more for health insurance than men? Did you know that on average women who don't smoke pay more than men who do? You know now. Is this fair? How does that make you feel? It makes me feel sad and angry. It makes me want to write a blog post about it and most importantly, it makes me want to work for change.