SoCal Gas Sees the Light: Women’s Pay Is on Par With Men
For years, Southern California Gas Co.’s 470 customer service representatives--nearly all women who field phone calls in the office--had resented the fact that they were paid considerably less than the 1,100 appliance service representatives--nearly all men--who service those complaints in the field.
This month, that changes.
As the result of a new “pay-equity” agreement between the Utility Workers Union of America and the company--an agreement rarely seen in private industry--both classes of workers will be paid equally.
The contract, based on a meticulous study of 187 characteristics of the 180 types of jobs in the gas company, raised the clerical workers from $633 a week to $716, a 13% increase. By contrast, the appliance service reps went up only 2%, from $702 to the same $716.
For a decade, scores of state and local government agencies have been studying and equalizing wide differences in pay between public-sector workers who perform jobs of comparable value. In most cases, these efforts have come in response to complaints that pay structures unfairly penalized job categories dominated by women.
For example, Washington state several years ago set new pay levels for 62,000 state employees, raising wages in female-dominated jobs twice as sharply as those in male-dominated jobs. The gap between average wages of men and women shrank to 5% from 20% in four years.
The Democratic Party’s civil rights legislation, now being debated in Congress, includes creation of a Labor Department program to study the pay-equity issue and to offer “technical assistance” to employers to correct unequal wage-setting practices.
So far, however, it is highly unusual for a private-sector employer--even a state-regulated utility such as the gas company--to experiment with pay equity, experts say.
E. James Brenan, a Missouri compensation consultant with extensive pay-equity experience, estimated that no more than a few dozen private companies have formally analyzed and redrawn their pay structures to ensure that skill levels are equally compensated.
The biggest reason is that implementing a pay-equity program suggests--correctly or otherwise--that the company has a history of discrimination, Brenan said. Companies that undertake pay-equity programs rarely want to talk about it, Brenan and other experts said.
“Announcing it to employees says, ‘We have been shortchanging you for a generation, and by the way, we’re just coming around now to announce it,’ ” Brenan said.
The gas company pay restructuring is well-known within the firm because of union activity. However, the company made no attempt to publicize the agreement.
Overall, wages of the company’s 6,000 non-management employees will go up 5% this year. But the increases will vary dramatically, from zero for a planning assistant to 26% for a “collection control” clerk.
Nothing better personifies the change than the equalization of wages between customer service reps and appliance service reps.
“The CSRs always felt our jobs were comparable to the ASRs,” said Kathy Yeaman, a 42-year-old customer service rep who works in Redlands. “To make the jobs pay equally is historic.”
Customer service reps are partially creatures of technology. They take customer calls, typing them into a computer. The system that stores this information also monitors the pace at which the reps work.
The average length of a week’s calls are measured and compared with a desired rate of efficiency--a practice that not only increases the pressure of the job but also increases frequency of injury, according to some scientific studies. From 6 million to 10 million American workers are similarly monitored.
Appliance service reps don’t have the same mental pressure, but they do have greater physical demands involved in peering into and trying to repair gas-powered home appliances. They also draw overtime shifts with less predictability.
How do you quantify and compare those skills?
Gas company management began trying after 1988 contract negotiations, in which Local 132 of the utility workers union and the company quarrelled over company suggestions to reduce the pay of some clerical workers. Hoping to gain objective evidence, the company suggested a formal study. It hired a consulting firm, Jeanneret & Associates, which tried to put each job under a microscope.
On a 1 to 5 scale, the study tried to rate many skills and sub-skills that are often taken for granted or ignored by managers and workers themselves.
For example, it evaluated not merely whether a job required hand-held tools, but the degree of precision; not merely the amount of information processing, but levels of compiling, decoding, transcribing and combining information from various sources; not merely whether the job required personal interplay, but the amount of persuasion, instruction, interviewing, signaling and writing; not merely whether an indoor job was hazardous, but the degrees of confined space, improper lighting or noise, and other subtle job demands such as attention to detail, time pressure, work distractions and “vigilance.”
The study added up the ratings and produced a point total for each job. While much of the study confirmed the obvious--an area sales representative’s job rated 701 points, compared to 406 points for a less-demanding meter records clerk job--there were some surprises.
The customer service rep’s job was graded only 4% less difficult than an appliance service rep’s, despite the fact that it paid 11% less.
The study results were published last fall, before negotiations on a new contract began. The union, seeking to apply additional pressure, organized a number of Southland feminist and other political organizations to participate in a February rally to urge that customer service reps’ pay be raised to the level of appliance service reps. About 1,500 people, most of them union members, attended.
“Many of us saw this as a beacon of light in the whole comparable-worth fight,” said Margaret Prescod, who heads a Los Angeles group promoting “wages for housework.” Prescod got involved in the campaign early--she happens to be the ex-wife of Sam Weinstein, a regional director of the union.
In wage negotiations, it was agreed that no category’s wage level would be cut. Fourteen pay-level brackets were created. The customer service rep and appliance service rep were placed in the same one--a political victory for the union. In May, members of Local 132 voted 2-1 to ratify the two-year contract. The second year’s wages will be negotiated next year.
Union and management officials acknowledge that there is not universal acceptance of the new pay levels, particularly among workers who received small increases.
“There are some people very concerned about the fact that they’re getting 2% and somebody else is getting 10%,” said Joyce Rowland, the gas company’s manager of labor relations. “When you’re changing 50 years of history, that’s a real hit to some people’s egos.”
Beatty Henson, 38, an appliance service rep in the company’s Beaumont office and a member of the union’s contract negotiating team, said he believes that the equalization is “pretty well acceptable” to his ranks.
After all, Henson said, referring to customer service rep Yeaman, “her job probably has more mental stress than mine. My job demands are more one-sided physically. If I have a bad customer, I can take a minute and think about it. She can’t.”
What Is Pay Equity? A few years ago, the type of agreement reached by Southern California Gas Co. and its union would have been called a “comparable-worth” agreement. Today, it’s known as “pay equity.” The only difference is semantics.
The goal has always been to equalize pay within a company not only so there is no racial or sexual discrimination, but so people who have different jobs of roughly equal skill levels are paid the same. Federal law has long required that people performing identical jobs be paid the same.
The “comparable-worth” movement, which began in the 1970s, tried to expand that protection beyond job titles.
After years of intense opposition by business groups, which contended that “comparable worth” was a veiled effort to throttle free enterprise, comparable-worth advocates gradually shifted to a politically less-sensitive title: “pay equity.”
A TALE OF TWO JOBS: PAY EQUITY IN THE GAS COMPANY
Here is how a new “pay equity” contract in the Southern California Gas Co. affected two of the largest groups of workers. The chart shows that customer service representatives were making 11% less than appliance service representatives. A detailed company study, which expressed skill levels by point rankings, subsequently showed that the customer service rep job required only 4% less skill than the appliance service rep job. The new contract equalized wages for both workers.
Customer Service Rep: $633 Customer Service Rep: $716 Appliance Service Rep: $702 Appliance Service Rep: $716 Note: Contract gives appliance service reps a one-time bonus payment of $732, equal to another 2% raise.
