Tag Archives: equal pay

Top Female Players Accuse U.S. Soccer of Wage Discrimination (New York Times)

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A compelling piece from Andrew Das of the New York Times.

 Female athlete wage discrimination

U.S. Soccer, the governing body for the sport in America, pays the members of the men’s and women’s national team who represent the United States in international competitions. The men’s team has historically been mediocre. The women’s team has been a quadrennial phenomenon, winning world and Olympic championships and bringing much of the country to a standstill in the process.

Citing this disparity, as well as rising revenue numbers, five players on the women’s team filed a federal complaint Wednesday, accusing U.S. Soccer of wage discrimination because, they said, they earned as little as 40 percent of what players on the United States men’s national team earned even as they marched to the team’s third world championship last year. The five players, some of the most prominent women’s athletes in sports, said they were shortchanged on everything from bonuses to appearance fees to per diems.

The case, submitted to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that enforces civil rights laws against workplace discrimination, is the latest front in the spreading debate over equal treatment of female athletes. A tennis tournament director was forced to resign recently after saying that female players “ride on the coattails of the men,” and the N.C.A.A. has drawn scrutiny for the financial disparities between the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments.

“The numbers speak for themselves,” said goalkeeper Hope Solo, one of the players to sign the complaint. “We are the best in the world, have three World Cup championships, four Olympic championships.” Solo said the men’s players “get paid more to just show up than we get paid to win major championships.”

Solo was joined in the complaint by the co-captains Carli Lloyd and Becky Sauerbrunn, forward Alex Morgan and midfielder Megan Rapinoe.

U.S. Soccer officials pushed back forcefully on the players’ claims in a conference call Thursday night, citing figures that the federation said showed the men’s national team produced revenue and attendance about double that of the women’s team, and television ratings that were “a multiple” of what the women attract, according to Sunil Gulati, the U.S. Soccer president. A federation spokesman, Neil Buethe, called some of the revenue figures in the players’ complaint “inaccurate, misleading or both.”

In a statement released earlier Thursday, U.S. Soccer recounted the role the federation has played in the growth of women’s soccer, including its introduction to the Olympic Games and in providing full-time salaries for top players. It said it was willing to discuss compensation as part of continuing talks over a new collective bargaining agreement.

But in linking their compensation to the men’s pay, the women’s players put U.S. Soccer in a difficult position. The federation has collective bargaining agreements with both teams, but the financial terms differ widely.

A men’s player, for example, receives $5,000 for a loss in a friendly match but as much as $17,625 for a win against a top opponent. A women’s player receives $1,350 for a similar match, but only if the United States wins; women’s players receive no bonuses for losses or ties.

Opportunities for women to participate in sports have increased greatly in the more than 40 years since the passage of the gender-equity legislation known as Title IX. But sports officials continue to struggle with matters of compensation.

It has been argued that men’s sports, and their players, deserve a financial edge because they draw bigger crowds and generate far more money in ticket sales and corporate sponsorships. That is the case for U.S. Soccer’s national teams, the federation said Thursday. But that is not true for every sport. Women’s figure skating, for instance, has often drawn higher TV ratings and bigger crowds than men’s figure skating.

In their complaint, the five players cited recent U.S. Soccer financial reports as proof that they have become the federation’s main economic engine even as, they said, they often earned only half as much — or less — than their male counterparts.

At the same time, the players said, they exceeded revenue projections by as much as $16 million in 2015, when their World Cup triumph set television viewership records and a nine-game victory tour in packed stadiums produced record gate receipts and attendance figures.

U.S. Soccer officials disputed those figures, arguing that the women and their lawyer, Jeffrey Kessler, cherry-picked an extraordinarily successful year to draw broad conclusions.

Michael LeRoy, who teaches collective bargaining and sports at the University of Illinois, said that market conditions between the men’s and women’s sports are vastly different. LeRoy pointed to a high-profile case brought by Marianne Stanley, the women’s basketball coach at the University of Southern California in the early 1990s, who argued she should be paid at a level equal to the men’s coach. Her legal effort was unsuccessful.

“They have to prove equality of work and market conditions, and it’s such a rigid legal requirement,” LeRoy said of the women’s soccer players.

While women have often been dismissed in international soccer — the men’s World Cup began in 1930 and the women’s not until 1991 — they have become the sport’s standard-bearers in the United States. The women’s team has provided the type of repeated success that has remained elusive for the American men. Not so long ago, a woman, Mia Hamm, may have been the best-known soccer player in the country.

When Hamm and her teammates won the 1999 World Cup in the United States, they also set records for attendance and television viewing. Last summer, when the United States defeated Japan to win another Women’s World Cup, the final was seen by 25.4 million viewers on Fox — a record for a men’s or women’s soccer game on English-language television in this country.

“We have been quite patient over the years with the belief that the federation would do the right thing and compensate us fairly,” said Lloyd, the most valuable player of the Women’s World Cup.

Although only five players signed the complaint, they said they were acting on behalf of the entire women’s team, saying they are all employees of U.S. Soccer through their national team contracts. That is significant, according to Peter Romer-Friedman, the deputy director of litigation for the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights.

“By speaking up publicly, the players are saying, ‘It’s important for the public to know that we’ve filed this suit,’ ” Romer-Friedman said. “Frankly, as a civil rights lawyer, it is important for them to speak out because it has an educational effect.”

The filing of the complaint was the latest move in an increasingly contentious legal fight between U.S. Soccer and the women’s national team, which is favored to repeat as Olympic champion at the Rio Games in August but has long grumbled about its pay, working conditions and travel and hotel arrangements.

The long-simmering feud boiled over after last summer’s Women’s World Cup triumph. A match in Hawaii that was part of the team’s victory tour was canceled when the players refused to play on an artificial-turf field they deemed unsafe. Gulati later apologized for the situation.

Two months later, the disagreement veered into federal court when U.S. Soccer took the unusual step of filing a lawsuit against the national team’s players’ union as part of a dispute about the validity of the players’ collective bargaining agreement. The federation contends the agreement, which expired in 2012, lives on in a memorandum of understanding the sides signed in early 2013. The union contends it does not.

In response to the complaint filed Wednesday, U.S. Soccer argued that not only was the players’ pay collectively bargained, but that the players had insisted more than once on a salary-based system as a means of economic security over the bonus-centric plan the men work under. Russell Sauer, the outside counsel for the federation during labor talks, also said the women’s labor contract included provisions — severance and injury pay, health benefits and maternity leave, for example — not available to the men’s team.

“The truth is,” Sauer said, “the players are claiming discrimination based on a more conservative structure, based on guaranteed compensation rather than pay to play, which they themselves requested, negotiated and approved of not once, but twice.”

Furthermore, U.S. Soccer noted, a major source of revenue and contention — World Cup prize money — is determined by FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, not the federation. But the women’s complaint seems to take aim at a bigger share of domestic revenue, like sponsorships and television contracts, and U.S. Soccer financial reports hint at a richer future involving the team: The federation’s budget projections for 2016 include $2.3 million for a 10-game victory tour after this summer’s Olympics.

Pittsburgh employment lawyer Charles A. Lamberton. Representing employees in discrimination, retaliation, sexual harassment and wrongful termination cases for more than 15 years. High end representation for high end cases and clients. Contact us today.

 

 

Equal pay claims

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The right of employees to be free from discrimination in their compensation is protected under several federal laws, including the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, and Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

The law against compensation discrimination includes all payments made to or on behalf employees as remuneration for employment. All forms of compensation are covered, including salary, overtime pay, bonuses, stock options, profit sharing and bonus plans, life insurance, vacation and holiday pay, cleaning or gasoline allowances, hotel accommodations, reimbursement for travel expenses, and benefits.

Equal Pay Act

The Equal Pay Act requires that men and women be given equal pay for equal work in the same establishment. The jobs need not be identical, but they must be substantially equal. It is job content, not job titles, that determines whether jobs are substantially equal. Specifically, the EPA provides that employers may not pay unequal wages to men and women who perform jobs that require substantially equal skill, effort and responsibility, and that are performed under similar working conditions within the same establishment. Each of these factors is summarized below:

Skill

Measured by factors such as the experience, ability, education, and training required to perform the job. The issue is what skills are required for the job, not what skills the individual employees may have. For example, two bookkeeping jobs could be considered equal under the EPA even if one of the job holders has a master’s degree in physics, since that degree would not be required for the job.

Effort

The amount of physical or mental exertion needed to perform the job. For example, suppose that men and women work side by side on a line assembling machine parts. The person at the end of the line must also lift the assembled product as he or she completes the work and place it on a board. That job requires more effort than the other assembly line jobs if the extra effort of lifting the assembled product off the line is substantial and is a regular part of the job. As a result, it would not be a violation to pay that person more, regardless of whether the job is held by a man or a woman.

Responsibility

The degree of accountability required in performing the job. For example, a salesperson who is delegated the duty of determining whether to accept customers’ personal checks has more responsibility than other salespeople. On the other hand, a minor difference in responsibility, such as turning out the lights at the end of the day, would not justify a pay differential.

Working Conditions

This encompasses two factors: (1) physical surroundings like temperature, fumes, and ventilation; and (2) hazards.

Establishment

The prohibition against compensation discrimination under the EPA applies only to jobs within an establishment. An establishment is a distinct physical place of business rather than an entire business or enterprise consisting of several places of business. In some circumstances, physically separate places of business may be treated as one establishment. For example, if a central administrative unit hires employees, sets their compensation, and assigns them to separate work locations, the separate work sites can be considered part of one establishment.

Pay differentials are permitted when they are based on seniority, merit, quantity or quality of production, or a factor other than sex. These are known as “affirmative defenses” and it is the employer’s burden to prove that they apply.

In correcting a pay differential, no employee’s pay may be reduced. Instead, the pay of the lower paid employee(s) must be increased.

Title VII, ADEA, and ADA

Title VII, the ADEA, and the ADA prohibit compensation discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, or disability. Unlike the EPA, there is no requirement that the claimant’s job be substantially equal to that of a higher paid person outside the claimant’s protected class, nor do these statutes require the claimant to work in the same establishment as a comparator.

Compensation discrimination under Title VII, the ADEA, or the ADA can occur in a variety of forms. For example:

An employer pays an employee with a disability less than similarly situated employees without disabilities and the employer’s explanation (if any) does not satisfactorily account for the differential.

An employer sets the compensation for jobs predominately held by, for example, women or African-Americans below that suggested by the employer’s job evaluation study, while the pay for jobs predominately held by men or whites is consistent with the level suggested by the job evaluation study.

An employer maintains a neutral compensation policy or practice that has an adverse impact on employees in a protected class and cannot be justified as job-related and consistent with business necessity. For example, if an employer provides extra compensation to employees who are the “head of household,” i.e., married with dependents and the primary financial contributor to the household, the practice may have an unlawful disparate impact on women.

It is also unlawful to retaliate against an individual for opposing employment practices that discriminate based on compensation or for filing a discrimination charge, testifying, or participating in any way in an investigation, proceeding, or litigation under Title VII, ADEA, ADA or the Equal Pay Act.

A 20% premium wage just for being male

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The Equal Pay Act has been law for 50 years, but women are still way behind men in earnings.

April 9 is the date when U.S. working women finally catch up to the amount men earned by last December 31. That’s because the gender pay gap between women and men for full time year round workers is 20 cents on the dollar, and it’s not closing. In fact, it’s getting wider. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, at current rates it will take another 45 years for women to catch up.

There are a number of causes for the pay gap, including job segregation ( “men’s jobs” – like plumbing, pay more than “women’s jobs” – like teaching). And more women take time out to care for kids and aging parents. But as many women know, plain old sex discrimination plays a big part. Lilly Ledbetter found out the hard way after 19 years at Goodyear, when she learned she had been underpaid all along compared to men doing the same job. Her case went all the way to the Supreme Court – where she lost. The conservatives on the Supreme Court said she should have complained earlier, even though she didn’t know about the discrimination earlier.

Congress fixed that catch-22 with Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first law President Obama signed. But that very small step for womankind was not nearly enough. The main reason Ledbetter got shafted was that she didn’t know her situation compared to the men. Employers still have no obligation to report pay statistics, and in most companies you can even get fired for talking pay with co-workers.

There’s a new bill – The Paycheck Fairness Act – to stop these arbitrary firings – if Congress ever passes it. Another tiny step, but it does nothing to help women learn how they’re being paid compared to men in the first place.

President Obama could fix a big part of the problem even without Congress. He could issue an Executive Order not only banning the practice of firing people for talking about pay, but also requiring employers to release pay statistics by gender. Not all employers, of course – just those that want federal contracts, paid for with your tax dollars. In this day of bailouts and boondoggles at taxpayer expense, citizens footing the bills have a right to know that any company getting government business pays its workers fairly.

Contact Pittsburgh employment lawyer Charles A. Lamberton at 412-258-2250 or visit the our Pittsburgh employment law firm website at lambertonlaw.com for more information.

Young women, college and the wage gap

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Don’t assume your first pay offer will be the same as what a similar male graduate will get. Fifty years after the Equal Pay Act was passed, studies continue to find a pay gap between men and women. Some of the difference – women earn about four-fifths of men’s pay – can be attributed to women choosing lower-paying fields, or women temporarily leaving the workforce to raise children, or women taking more part-time jobs.

But a comprehensive report by the American Association of University Women, released last week, zeroed in on a workforce segment that, theoretically, should be on par: women and men getting their first jobs after college graduation.

The finding: Nearly the same gender gap as for the workforce at large. Young women, on average, are earning 82 percent of what their male peers are earning one year after college graduation.

Again, the choice of major and profession makes a difference. Men are more likely to be in the higher paying engineering and science fields.

But even in comparable business and management positions, women are earning less. Among business majors, for example, the survey found women earning about $38,000, on average, compared to men’s average of $45,000.

So here are the career recommendations for women who are concerned about the gap:

Don’t count on equal pay laws. Be prepared to tackle the pay issue head-on. Women’s advocacy groups say most women aren’t as aggressive about negotiating pay as men.

Don’t blindly accept the first number a prospective employer offers. Know a reasonable, competitive pay amount – that you’ve researched through your campus career office or online pay sources such as salary.com – and don’t be afraid to negotiate before you accept the job.

Studies repeatedly show that if you start out behind your male peer it can make a lifetime pay difference of tens of thousands of dollars. And that can hurt your ability to repay student loans and, eventually, your retirement pay amount.