Equal Pay Act
The Equal Pay Act amended the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) with the intent to end the disparity in wages between men and women. The amendment argued that sex discrimination depressed wages and living standards for employees, hindered full employment, caused labor disputes that in turn affected commerce, and violated free and fair competition. The crucial part of the amendment: “No employer having employees subject to any provisions of this section shall discriminate, within any establishment in which such employees are employed, between employees on the basis of sex by paying wages to employees in such establishment at a rate less than the rate at which he pays wages to employees of the opposite sex in such establishment for equal work on jobs[,] the performance of which requires equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and which are performed under similar working conditions, except where such payment is made pursuant to (i) a seniority system; (ii) a merit system; (iii) a system which measures earnings by quantity or quality of production; or (iv) a differential based on any other factor other than sex…”
Commentary
Cry Wolf Quotes
[Consider] the possible impact of this bill upon efforts to equalize wages in plants employing mostly women and relatively few men. If there is a wage differential between men and women that cannot be justified under the restrictive standards of this bill and the wages of the male employees cannot be reduced, a plant could run into serious financial difficulty if it were forced to increase the pay of all female employees to the level of the few male members.
The fact that men have been employed in industry over a longer period than have women in general, and also the fact that the average length of time devoted to industry by a man is greater than that of women, makes it natural that the jobs which require more experience and certain higher skills are more frequently assigned to men than to women.
I assume that a typical goal of the proposed bill would be to eliminate [pay differentials]….if the bill did this it would eliminate thousands and even hundreds of thousands of job opportunities for women.
Any figures advanced to sustain a case that extensive rate discrimination exists, are likely to be misleading because they cannot represent the full extent to which the principle of equal pay for equal work exists throughout industry. While contract provisions might show the degree to which equal pay is embodied in collective bargaining agreements, they fail to indicate the far greater number of cases where employers of their own volition paid the same rates to men and women where jobs were equal, or where an identical wage scale is applicable to men and women although no specific ‘equal wage’ provision is contained in the agreement.
