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Unequal Pay?

Here’s an item I found at Feministing. Apparently, there was a recent ruling by the European Court of Justice on an equal-pay issue that was touted in the press as a blow to equal pay for mothers. Take this article, headlined “No Equal Pay For Mothers”:

Women who take time out of the workplace for maternity leave have been told they have no right to the same pay as male colleagues.

Thousands of UK employers could now be forced to review their pay schemes.

The European Court of Justice has ruled that women can be paid less than men if their length of service is shorter because they have taken time off to look after children

The court said length of service was an acceptable basis on which to decide how much an employee should be paid.

The trades union Prospect said it was the most important sex discrimination judgment for 10 years, meaning experience is a key factor in deciding salaries.

Sounds bad, right? But something didn’t sit right, and one of the commenters at Feministing pointed out this analysis of the ruling from the BBC, which goes a long way to clarify the issue:

The European Court of Justice has rejected an appeal by Bernadette Cadman, 44, from Manchester, who said it was wrong to pay more to male staff simply because they had been longer in the post. So what does this ruling mean?

The decision means that employers can pay more to people who have worked for them longer.

The analysis notes that the pay structure does not count maternity leave (presumably for some set time per law) against women’s length of service, but should an employee have a break in service — something that, apparently, Cadman did (one of the commenters noted that she had taken something like 12 years off).

Now, if you take maternity leave, your contract continues during that leave.

The women it will affect are those who took a career break which did not count towards seniority.

This may happen either because they changed employers or because the employer’s scheme did not count the career break time as part of their employment.

So what the ruling does, apparently, is allow employers to pay more for greater length of service if they can prove that it is not unfair in some way to do that (such as when it’s discriminatory based on age or sex because there’s no accumulation of skills over time).

I can’t say I’m thrilled with that outcome; it sounds an awful lot like what Wal-Mart is proposing to do with salary caps. And if you’ve taken a multi-year break from work above and beyond maternity leave, is it fair to the people who’ve put in the time — male and female — if you get credited with time served even though you weren’t there?

Thoughts?


7 thoughts on Unequal Pay?

  1. My first thought is “there goes the childbirth rate in England…should be down below Germany’s any time now.” Because if you make it hard to have children fewer people will have children. I expect that, like Germany, they’ll start rethinking this policy when it becomes clear that their worker:retiree ratio is going to be less than 0.5 in another 50 years or so.

  2. My first thought is “there goes the childbirth rate in England…should be down below Germany’s any time now.” Because if you make it hard to have children fewer people will have children. I expect that, like Germany, they’ll start rethinking this policy when it becomes clear that their worker:retiree ratio is going to be less than 0.5 in another 50 years or so.

  3. I don’t know, Dianne; sounds like they have pretty good protections for workers taking standard maternity leave (and anyone who lives in England can help me out by telling me how long it is). It’s the time *out of the workforce entirely* that counts against them.

    Which, honestly, I can’t argue with. I would expect someone who took two years off for whatever reason (raising kids, writing a book, traveling) to come back into the workforce where they left off, not where they would have been had they stayed on.

  4. What zuzu said. This is an issue where it’s possible to compromise: a set, reasonable period with no penalty; anything after that is the individual’s responsibility.

    Now, if only more businesses had child-friendly workplace policies. But that’s another debate entirely.

  5. It’s seems stupid that – if paying more for length of service is okay because it’s linked with experience – taking X months off maternity leave gets you treated differently than taking X months off for another reason. Surely you’re going to lose the same amount of experience either way? Aren’t the ignoring the very factor they use to justify pay by length of service when it comes to maternity leave?

    sounds like they have pretty good protections for workers taking standard maternity leave (and anyone who lives in England can help me out by telling me how long it is).

    Currently 9 months, which they plan on raising to a year. To be honest, it seems daft to me that two people can start a job at the same time, one can take three years out to have kids, and they then get paid the same on ‘years of service’, ostensibly justifed on the grounds of experience, even though one’s been there for four years and the other one.

    My first thought is “there goes the childbirth rate in England…should be down below Germany’s any time now.”

    The decision was made by the European Court of Justice.

  6. I’m all for maternity leave, but you cant get angry if you are financially disadvantaged on the basis of experience if you take it. If woman A takes a year off and woman B doesn’t, when the promotion comes up, or the raise, a month after woman A comes back to work, who has worked the hardest for the company? Who is more in touch with the market and corporate parctices? Woman will have to wait a year or more and just hack it. I believe this applies fully to men taking paternity leave also. This isn’t a gender based problem, its not even a problem, but if anything it is basic economics, ehtics and fairness.

    If governments want the birth rate to go up they should start supplying the money and means to do it, not relying on companies to foot the bill. Better welfare for mothers, government paid maternity leave or family taxation would be a start.

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