FLSA & Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
HRVC
6 Posts
It is my understanding based on what I read regarding FLSA and the Lilly Ledbetter Act that you must pay men and women the same pay for the same type of work. My question is are you also required to pay employees doing the same type of work (that are all men) relatively the same wage for the same work? I understand the issue of protected classes but I was wondering if there is a difference when the employees are all men?
Are we required to offer comperable pay for comperable work if all the workers are men?
Also, I have been working with someone within our firm who is trying to hire someone at an intern level. He wants to set the salary for the young man at an intern wage however, he has the same expertise and background as other young men within the firm who qualify (based on our employee manual) at a higher level and wage. Can he do this? I don't believe he can but am really unsure.
Comments
[quote user="HRVC"]It is my understanding based on what I read regarding FLSA and the Lilly Ledbetter Act that you must pay men and women the same pay for the same type of work. My question is are you also required to pay employees doing the same type of work (that are all men) relatively the same wage for the same work? I understand the issue of protected classes but I was wondering if there is a difference when the employees are all men?[/quote]
Actually, there are very few protected classes, but a lot of protected characteristics. For example, your sex is a protected characteristic. That means that you cannot discriminate by sex in employment decisions. What falls out of that is that you may not make any employment decision on the basis of whether a person is a man or a woman (unless you can show that sex is a BFOQ, such as needing men to be Chippendales dancers). In the case of wage decisions, sex discrimination was proscribed by the Equal Pay Act of 1963.
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is an amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its primary purpose is to stipulate that an act of illegally discriminatory pay occurs each time a check is issued rather than at the time the compensation decision was made. The purpose of that is to make it easier to make claims of sex based wage discrimination and it is a response to a recet Supreme Court ruling that the timer for the windo to make a complaint began at the pay decision point, not at the subsequent payroll pay dates.
[quote user="HRVC"] Are we required to offer comperable pay for comperable work if all the workers are men? [/quote]
Yes. Aside from the fact that they may have other protected characteristics that you don't know about but, if they came to light, would look very bad for you such as if all the people of a particular faith were making less money than similarly situated employees of another faith. Different laws, same problems. You can have pay differences bade on seniority and performance appraisals, but you can't have widely divergent pay plans for people doing the same stuff with similar seniority and performance appraisal records and expect to operate with little or no risk.
[quote user="HRVC"]Also, I have been working with someone within our firm who is trying to hire someone at an intern level. He wants to set the salary for the young man at an intern wage however, he has the same expertise and background as other young men within the firm who qualify (based on our employee manual) at a higher level and wage. Can he do this? I don't believe he can but am really unsure.[/quote]
Some of that will depend on your own internal policies. From a legal standpoint, assuming the intern isn't doing what the other employees are doing, you do not have to pay people according to their ability or employ them to their full potential. You can hire a nobel laureate in chemistry to be a wall mart greeter or to work the fry station at McDonald's. You can also hire a college sophomore to do materials research for components of experimental hypersonic near-space craft.
The key issue is that you can't discriminate in pay on the basis of any protected characteristic--gender, age, disability, race, national origin, religion, etc. This was the law long before Lilly Ledbetter. So, if there are differences in pay between members of protected and nonprotected classes, you should make sure it has a well-documented, job/business related reason for the discrepancy.
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (LLFPA) reversed a Supreme Court decision and now each paycheck an employee receives that reflects a discriminatory pay decision starts a new 180/300 day time period in which the employee can file a claim of discrimination. Interestingly, the LLFPA applies to Title VII, the ADA, and the ADEA. So it affects claims of pay discrimination based on any protected characteristics. The only thing the act changed is how the time for filing a claim is calculated.
As far as the intern, if the individual is being hired as an intern then I think you would pay him the wage scale for interns. However, if he will really be doing the same work as the others you mention, then the appropriate pay scale might be the one for the regular job. In the situation you describe, they are all men so you don't have a gender issue that I can see. You might have an age, race, religion, or other discrimination problem