U.S. Must Tackle Equal-Pay Issue

Some cases of wage discrimination against women and minorities seem so clear-cut that it is amazing they can take years to resolve.

Just last week, a judge finally approved settlement of an equal-pay lawsuit filed five years ago by a multi-union council against hundreds of New York City hotels and motels.

It will cost the hotels and motels about $10 million to end longstanding wage-discrimination patterns. It will mean extra pay hikes for the 12,000 female hotel maids, who, incidentally, will now be called “room attendants.”

The room attendants were paid $15 a week less than the “housemen,” who will be known as “house attendants” from now on.

After all those years of legal arguments and strike threats, management agreed to close a wage gap that was significant for the low-income women. And both the men and women will get a general pay hike of 5.5%.

The arguments in the case weren’t complicated. The female room attendants cleaned and polished rooms. The male house attendants also cleaned and polished, but did their work in hallways and lobbies--for more money.

Winn Newman, labor’s pre-eminent comparable-worth lawyer, called the agreement a major victory for those who believe that workers should be paid equally when their jobs are comparable.

The New York employers called it a very satisfactory settlement.

Not all wage-discrimination cases are as clear-cut as the New York hotel and motel case seems to be.

Some jobs filled predominantly by women are not always as easily compared to male-dominated jobs, but there are ways to make fair comparisons, and they are increasingly being made.

Advocates of pay equity first won a preliminary skirmish in 1963, when Congress passed a law saying that women must be paid the same wages men earn for doing the exact same jobs.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 expanded that to prohibit paying less money to minorities as well as women for the same jobs, and it also prohibited job discrimination generally.

But it did not deal with the complex issue of comparable worth.

President Bush’s veto of the first major civil rights bill in decades will further delay the long struggle to end wage discrimination against women and minorities.

The bill that was passed last week by Congress would have advanced civil rights and restored many job-discrimination protections that were weakened badly by recent Supreme Court decisions. Among other things, it would have overturned or modified Supreme Court decisions that made it much more difficult for women and minorities to prove job discrimination.

But Congress seemed to give only a faint nod of recognition to the cause of comparable worth, which has received serious setbacks in recent lower-court decisions.

The anti-discrimination laws, even before they were watered down by the high court, did not require employers to pay women and minorities the same wages paid to white men, even when their jobs required comparable skills, education, energy and working conditions--the usual comparable-worth tests.

The legislators wrongly failed to specifically mandate comparable worth.

Civil rights advocates didn’t press hard for such a provision, hoping vainly to soften Bush’s opposition to the rest of the bill.

Despite congressional inaction, progress toward pay equity is being made in a piecemeal fashion through legislation at the state and local level, and in more and more union contracts with both private and government employers.

Most employers fight such provisions, arguing, among other things, that it is too difficult for them to compare the money value of jobs.

This ignores the fact that such comparisons are being made regularly where comparable-worth provisions are in effect, and most of the employers involved in them have ultimately agreed that pay inequities did exist and needed correcting.

Employers also complain that it costs too much money to end the proven wage discrimination.

Newman, the labor lawyer, skewers that argument by observing that it would be immoral and should be illegal to refuse to end wage discrimination against women and minorities because it costs too much money.

In the absence of federal legislation, almost every advance toward ending wage discrimination has come only after lengthy fights by civil rights organizations and unions, or by strikes or strike threats.

In the past 10 years, wage discrimination has been wiped out for tens of thousands of public employees alone, giving them more than $500 million in pay-equity adjustments, according to Claudia Wayne, executive director of the National Committee on Pay Equity.

She says all but five states have taken at least some action to end wage discrimination, ranging from studies of the problem to adoption of broad-based plans for comprehensively eliminating discriminatory practices.

“In every instance where pay equity was studied at the state or local level, clearly defined pay discrimination has been found,” Wayne says.

Unions like those in New York have also made some pay equity gains in the private sector. Others, such as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the Service Employees International Union, have made even greater strides for public workers.

By putting the issue on the bargaining table, unions not only have a chance of curbing the evil of wage discrimination, but they also make unions more attractive to women and minorities, who will make up about 80% of all new job entrants by the year 2000.

Legislation to strengthen our civil rights laws is essential, but pay equity is also a vital issue that clearly ought to be included by Congress when it renews the civil rights battle.