Pay Equity Handbook

This publication contains papers which address the following issues: how to cope with pay equity legislation; the view from the Commission on pay equity; who is the employer in terms of the Pay Equity Act?; the implication of pay equity on job evaluation systems; some legal issues concerning the Pay Equity Act; definition and implementation of Pay equity at the University of Western Ontario; and management and unions working together for pay equity.

Compensation fairness is a universal preoccupation in today’s workplace, from whispers around the water cooler to kabuki in the C-suite. Gender discrimination takes center stage in discussions of internal pay equity, but many other protected characteristics may be invoked as grounds for alleging discrimination: age, race, disability, physical appearance, and more. This broad range of vulnerability to discrimination charges is often neglected in corporate assessments of how well compensation systems comply with the law and satisfy employee norms of fairness. Blind spots in general equity constitute a serious threat to organizational performance and risk management. In Compensating Your Employees Fairly, a respected practitioner and consultant lays out in practical terms everything you need to know to protect your company along the full spectrum of internal pay equity issues, including all the technical methods you need to optimize compliance and minimize risk. Compensating Your Employees Fairly is a timely survey and comprehensive handbook for compensation specialists, HR professionals, EEO compliance officers, and in-house counsel. It provides all the information you need to ensure that compensation systems are equitable, auditable, internally consistent, and externally compliant with equal employment opportunity laws and regulations. The author presents technical information—both legal and statistical—in common-sense terms. Her non-technical breakdown of complex statistical concepts distills just as much as practitioners need to know in order to effectively deploy and interpret the standard applications of statistical analysis to internal pay equity. The focus throughout the book is on real-world application, current examples, and up-to-the-minute information on recent and pending wrinkles in the evolving legal landscape. Readers of Compensating Your Employees Fairly will learn: Why internal equity in compensation matters How to detect intentional and non-intentional discrimination in compensation The basics of statistical inference and multiple regression analysis The essentials of data availability, measurability, and collection The criteria for assessing compensation systems for internal equity How to investigate potential problems and react to formal complaints and actions How to avoid litigation and put in place ongoing measures for proactive self-auditing What you’ll learn Readers of Compensating Your Employees Fairly will learn: Why internal equity in compensation matters How to detect intentional and non-intentional discrimination in compensation How to investigate potential problems and react to formal complaints and actions How to avoid litigation and put in place ongoing measures for proactive self-auditing Who this book is for HR professionals, compensation specialists, EEO compliance officers, in-house counsel, and employment attorneys will find invaluable the expert author’s non-technical treatment of the technical issues that are essential to understanding all facets of internal pay equity. Without a working understanding of how to make their data tell a clear story, these various professionals cannot ensure that their compensation systems are equitable, auditable, and demonstrably compliant with equal employment opportunity laws and regulations. Table of Contents Why Equity in Compensation Matters Types of Discrimination in Compensation Multiple Regression Analysis The Data Regression Models of Equal Pay Other Tests of Equal Pay Analysis Follow-Up The Changing Landscape of Pay Equity Enforcement Causes of the Gender Pay Gap Litigation Avoidance and Proactive Self-Analysis The Basics of Statistical Inference

McCann explains how wage discrimination battles have raised public legal consciousness and helped reform activists mobilize working women in the pay equity movement over the past two decades. Rights at Work explores the political strategies in more than a dozen pay equity struggles since the late 1970s, including battles of state employees in Washington and Connecticut, as well as city employees in San Jose and Los Angeles. Relying on interviews with over 140 union and feminist activists, McCann shows that, even when the courts failed to correct wage discrimination, litigation and other forms of legal advocacy provided reformers with the legal discourse--the understanding of legal rights and their constraints--for defining and advancing their cause.