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?