Paycheck Fairness Act - Coming Soon?
As those who have been following my tweets know, I have been at the American Bar Association's House of Delegates and midyear meetings. There's lots of substance to these meetings and you can certainly follow along with the ABA Journal.
Among the topics discussed today, was the Paycheck Fairness Act now pending in Congress. If you are not familiar with it, you should be because by all accounts, it's moving front and center this year as an important piece of legislation for the Obama Administration and others. Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut is the primary sponsor of the bill in the House of Representatives.
John Phillips reported on this recently. As a result, employers should take stock of their compliance programs and certainly begin a review (if it is not done regularly) of your current compensation procedures.
What does the bill do? John has a good summary but some of the key changes would be to revise the remedies for sex discrimination in the payment of wages by permitting uncapped punitive and compensatory damages and limit employers’ ability to defend against EPA claims. The bill would also prohibit an employer from retaliating against an employee who inquires about, discusses, or discloses his/her own wage or that of another employee unless the disclosing employee has access to that wage information as part of his/her essential job function.
ctive wrong-doing detailed in the two joint reports was not systemic in that only a few people were directly implicated in it. But the failure was systemic in that the system – the institution – failed to check the behavior of those who did wrong. There was a failure of supervision by senior officials in the Department. And there was a failure on the part of some employees to cry foul when they were aware, or should have been aware, of problems.
