This was the simplest of the various workplace-oriented bills for Congress to push through for the new president because, unlike the contentious and deceptively named Employee Free Choice Act, there is a broader base of support for the principle of fair and equal pay in the workplace.
One thing that I was surprised to read, however, was that the Fair Pay Act might also do something else—make for more workplace cultures where pay was transparent and everyone knew what everyone else was making.
Miami Herald workplace columnist Cindy Krischer Goodman makes a bit of a case for doing this, and she quotes well-known financial analyst Suze Orman, who “believes employees could protect and empower each other by sharing salary information and confronting a boss if there are major discrepancies.”
She goes on to add this: “It is almost universally accepted that mayhem would ensue in a law firm or any workplace if people knew what their co-workers were making. Salary information traditionally is more guarded than a celebrity’s home number. Those pushing for equal pay for women think that should change.”
I’m all for trying to make the pay system better and fairer, but like all parents tell their children at one time or another, life isn’t fair. And although the push for pay equity is generally a noble and worthwhile goal, as a longtime manager I also know something else: Nobody wins when workers know what everybody else makes.
The problem is pretty basic. People are hired at different times under different conditions for different reasons. Unless you have a strict salary scale, there is no way to equalize the conditions one person is hired under versus the conditions another person might be hired under a year or two later. It’s a near impossible task to make this process “fair.”
“I am firmly in your camp on the issue of [pay] transparency,” she said in an e-mail. “I think the philosophy, the objectives and the system should be transparent—but not the actual salaries themselves. Not only is it an invasion of privacy, but I think, at the end of the day, organizational leadership has the right to make the call on what they think a job is worth. An employee has the right to disagree. I have had many, many one-on-one discussions with employees about their pay and this experience serves to convince me that most of us simply cannot be completely objective about our compensation (and some of us have wildly improbable ideas about the value of the work we do).
“There are certainly risks to making that call wrong, for an employer,” Ann added. “If [pay is] too low, employees (the good ones, at least) will be lured away. If too high, the cost of doing business rises above business competitors. If done in a discriminatory manner … well, I think the new laws will ensure that the employer is caught and punished. I don’t necessarily think that this is a bad thing—but I am concerned about how far over the line of reasonability we may be headed. I posted about a little research on this topic awhile ago—46 percent of employees want to know what others make, but 89 percent of them are reluctant to have their own salary data shared with others. So, I think we are a little conflicted ourselves about the idea!”
My experience over many years as a manager has led me to a simple conclusion: No one is really happy when people talk about pay and wages in the workplace, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is not going to change that basic dynamic. Comparing paychecks creates bad feelings, bad blood and bad karma. It’s also an HR nightmare to have your workers focused on everything other than the job at hand.
Here are some survey results guaranteed to get people talking: Although organizations believe workplace diversity is important, only 30 percent can define what diversity is.
This is the classic business dilemma—can you prove that your initiative is producing results? Are you willing to invest time and resources to demonstrate it? It’s probably why diversity efforts haven’t been more successful. If the business case for diversity could be more accurately measured and quantified, more organizations would not only embrace it, but would zero in and make diversity a bottom-line priority.
The SHRM workforce diversity study made this same point. When both HR professionals and diversity practitioners were asked an open-ended question about changes that could help foster greater diversity in the workplace, both groups had the same top response: a greater emphasis on the relationship between diversity and business results.
One contributor to the survey, Frank McCloskey, vice president of diversity at Georgia Power, had some pretty strong words about this. “The field is stuck, with little innovation in how we are tracking diversity,” he said. “There is lack of discipline and understanding of what diversity means beyond race and gender or how success is being defined, or not being defined, by most corporate diversity and inclusion initiatives.”
Anyone who dares to say that there’s a lack of strong, measurable business metrics for diversity efforts usually gets taken to task for it. But I can’t recall anyone actually producing something that showed the connection between diversity and bottom-line business results.
I wish they would. Maybe if someone did, diversity could become more of a strategic business practice and less of an elusive goal that, for most organizations, always seems just out of our reach.
Here is the latest one: the state Supreme Court ruled this week that despite a voter-approved law that makes medical marijuana legal, workers who indulge can still be “fired for testing positive for the drug at work.” According to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle, Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar said, “We have no reason to conclude the voters intended to speak so broadly, and in a context so far removed from the criminal law, as to require employers to accommodate marijuana use.”
This is a big issue because, as the Chronicle story noted, “Lawyers on both sides of the case said pre-employment testing for marijuana is common among California employers, especially those that have federal contracts and are legally required to keep their workplaces drug-free.”
The issue isn’t over, however. Some California legislators are vowing to pass legislation addressing the issue. A story in the Los Angeles Times said that “Within hours of the court’s decision, Assemblyman Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) announced that he would introduce legislation to prevent employers from discriminating against medical marijuana users. The people of California did not intend that patients be unemployed in order to use medical marijuana,” he said.
Frankly, I don’t think the people of California thought too deeply about the possible workplace repercussions when they passed the medical marijuana initiative back in 1996. Now, you have two legal issues that are at odds: a law that allows people to use medical marijuana legally for medical purposes versus the legally mandated need for employers to provide a drug-free workplace.
Is there a right answer here? How do we handle compassionate policies and laws that are at odds with safety and common sense in the workplace? If you have an answer, I’d love to see it—either as a comment here or an e-mail to me at jhollon@workforce.com.
Most people would probably say no, and that’s what makes a story in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer titled “Boeing bosses spy on workers” so frightening. “The tactics used by [the state of] Washington’s largest employer raise questions about where an employee’s rights begin and the employer’s end,” the story says, “and how much leeway any corporation has in investigating an employee if it suspects wrongdoing.”
Boeing, America’s premier plane builder, refused to discuss its surveillance policies with the Post-Intelligencer, except to say, “Issues that necessitate investigation in order to protect the company’s interests and those of its employees and other stakeholders are handled consistent with all applicable laws.”
Clearly, Boeing has a great deal of sensitive proprietary information that the company has a duty to protect. I don’t think that anyone would question that, but as the P-I story points out, some of the company’s actions seem more designed to intimidate employees and keep them from talking to the media. “Recently, a Boeing investigator told a Puget Sound-area employee that he was followed off company property to a lunch spot, that investigators had footage of him ‘coming and going’ and that investigators had accessed his personal Gmail account,” the newspaper said. “The primary reason for the 2007 investigation, the employee said, was Boeing’s suspicion that he had spoken with a member of the media.”
The employee–who was talking with the Post-Intelligencer for a story about Boeing’s struggles complying with a 2002 corporate reform law–was eventually confronted by company investigators who “laid out some of their findings. He has since been fired,” the newspaper reported.
“ ‘I wasn’t surprised, but more just disappointed in them,’ ” the fired employee told the newspaper. “ ‘Instead of looking at the problems, instead of investigating that, they investigated the people that were complaining and got rid of them,’ said the employee, who had been an auditor in the company’s Office of Internal Governance and asked that he not be named.”
This is a sobering story, and it raises two questions in my mind: how far should companies be able to go to protect their business secrets? And, how much should an employer be required to tell employees about the methods and manner in which they will be monitored to ensure that business secrets stay secret?
I’d love to hear what some of you have to say about this, either in a comment at the bottom of this item or in an e-mail to me at jhollon@workforce.com.
Sad to say, there is still a glass ceiling for women trying to rise to the highest ranks in business, but rarely do you get to see just how widespread the problem really is, even in a place that’s reputedly as forward-thinking as California.
According to a recent University of California, Davis, study, only 11.6 percent of executives in California’s 400 largest public companies are women. But, that’s not the surprising part. The big shock is that in Santa Clara County—the heart of future-oriented Silicon Valley—“only 9 percent of companies … have promoted a woman to a top post,” according to a story on the UC Davis study in the San Jose Mercury News. In addition, “only 7 percent of corporate boards include even one woman,” and as the newspaper points out, the study suggests that the role of women in corporations has changed relatively little in decades.
“The numbers are abysmal,” Nicole Woolsey Biggart, dean of the UC Davis Graduate School of Management, told the Mercury News. “What has absolutely dumbfounded me is [that] we look just like the Industrial Belt. We don’t look any different to me. That is the big shock.”
The story goes on to point out that “Some experts in workplace and gender issues say the study’s statistics underscore deep problems that involve social issues, the educational system, and how businesses recruit and treat women.” Added Biggart: “It’s as if women are just invisible. Women [just] aren’t being groomed the way men are being groomed.”
No one should really be shocked that the glass ceiling still exists. We’ve written about some of the reasons a number of times and even highlighted companies like Cigna that are committed to breaking through it. The shock is how thick the barrier still is in Silicon Valley, an area generally lauded for companies with forward-thinking workforce practices. Does it have anything to do with fact that Internet companies are still largely founded and nurtured by engineering nerds, who tend to be male and perhaps more inclined to hang out with—and hire or promote—their techie brethren?
What do we need to do to really, truly break down the glass ceiling that exists for women and minority groups? How can we get more diversity into the executive ranks, in Silicon Valley and elsewhere? Do you have an idea or suggestion? If so, attach a comment here, or e-mail me at jhollon@workforce.com.
= Member Only
