This paper is intended to present the analysis of the employment practice Good Old Acme Corporation allowed to materialize in the underpayment of female employees. Good Old Acme Corporation is at risk for legal action by allowing a disparity between male and female employees to exist, with regard to compensation, without justifiable cause. Good Old Acme Corporation needs to implement sound compensation policies.
The new President of Good Old Acme Corporation has inherited a ticking time bomb in the form of salary inequities at the company that encompass sex based discrimination. A number of female supervisors are paid at a rate that is substantially less than male counterparts. Upon investigating the disparity, no articulable justification could be found to support the disparity in pay scales.
The new President has a real issue with the Equal Pay Act of 1963. This Act sets forth the requirement that female employees may not be paid wages at a rate lower than of the opposite sex for doing roughly equivalent work. This also involves issues of discrimination and equal opportunity (EEOC).
If the President were able to perform an investigation and uncover legitimate reasons for the disparity in pay, the wage issue would be an ethical issue and not a legal issue. However, this is not the case in this scenario. There is no legal basis for the disparity.
Had the male supervisors endured additional duties or were the beneficiaries of a higher level of documented training, the difference could be justified. If there was a seniority system in place which effectively modified salaries based on this factor for all employees, the difference would be similarly justified. In this case, the difference was stated to most likely be the bias of the previous president (Dessler, 2011).
Companies that don’t have a strategic compensation plan in place, that is constantly monitored, run the risk of this type of occurrence. The professional human resource executive is
References: Dessler, G. (2011). Human Resource Management (12TH). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Inc. Sex Based Discrimination. (n.d.). Retrieved December 20, 2011, from U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission website: http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sex.cfm