Pay Discrimination – Raw Data Strike Again
(You can’t figure anything out unless all factors are taken into account)
Many women and minorities are going to hate me. Believe me, I mean no harm and am driven by no prejudice or bigotry. So much for the disclaimer, which comes from the bottom of my heart. But facts are facts, and every ethical statistician will tell you that raw data – simple percentages – are useless without differentiation. What does that mean? Behind every apparent disparity, whether it’s in pay rates or the incidence of certain diseases, there are manifold factors which must be included or the research is flawed. This can do and has done much harm, because on their face, percentage differences in such things as salaries look unfair and discriminatory and seem to demand immediate action.
Republicans in the Senate are being raked over the coals because on Wednesday they effectively blocked a measure that would have increased indefinitely the time between a perceived unfairness in pay and when an employee could file suit on that basis. If it had passed into law, the bill would have meant someone who thought he or she had been unfairly paid too little could have sued years later. Talk about tort reform! Can you imagine the explosion of lawsuits, and the inflationary, anti-employment expense involved? Under current labor law, you have six months to file a discrimination suit after the first paycheck you consider, with some evidence, to be unfair. I think that’s plenty of time and again, you cannot determine discrimination by looking at a figure that says women, on average, get paid 23 percent less than their male counterparts. There simply are too many other determinant factors to be considered.
First of all, there is nothing unfair about inequality of pay as such. For example, when I started out in radio, I was paid 400 dollars a month. I was hired to be the ’afternoon drive’ disc jockey, and yet guys – by which I mean other men – doing the same, or even lesser, jobs at the same station were being paid more. Why? Because they’d been there longer, and had been the recipients of scheduled or earned salary hikes that did not apply to newcomer me. Was that unfair? I didn’t think so at the time and I don’t think so now.
Later in my career, I was awarded a weekly bonus that made my salary substantially higher than most of my contemporaries, even guys and gals who’d been there longer. Now, was that unfair? It might have been, had the bonus been based on my gender, ethnicity or family background. But it wasn’t. Not to be immodest but merely factual, that bonus was based on my talent and the quality of my work. Actor Johnny Depp earned a reported 125 million dollars for his work in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” trilogy. Do you suppose co-stars Orlando Bloom or Kiera Knightley made that much? Get real. Depp’s acting and the character he played made those movies. It’s perfectly understandable and fair that he earned more.
The fact is, research by a number of sources has shown that, over the last generation or so, performance-based pay, in various forms, has accounted for at least a quarter of overall inequality in salaries. In other words, the harder and more effectively you work, the more you get. Is that a bad thing? I would say just the contrary and if you give it some thought, you probably would, too. And we’re talking about only one factor that mitigates pay inequality. I already mentioned tenure, which is a big one. There are many others, but this is not a term paper. I will say, though, that when all things are diligently sorted out, the apparent inequality in pay disappears.
A big part of the “American Dream” is that if you work hard, you will reap the rewards. That has never been more true than it is today, and I’m well aware of the sins of our past. Some of those sins persist here and there. The law provides redress in a timely fashion. But to make it possible for people to decide, 20 years after the fact, that they were the victims of discrimination in the workplace and file lawsuits? Why don’t we all just write checks to civil attorneys and get it over with? I submit that the measure scotched in the Senate would have amounted to the same thing.
