San Francisco Employment Law Blog

It is becoming common knowledge that there is a wide pay gap between women and men, as well as between different races in the United States. Although there exists a law called the Equal Pay Act, which seeks to protect all workers in the United States from pay discrimination, the pay gap still seems to prevail.

As an employee, it is important that you understand your rights to equal pay, and know what causes of action you can take if you believe that you are being discriminated against in regard to the amount of compensation you receive.

It goes without saying that today’s workplace, whether in California or elsewhere, often is less than pleasant. Discrimination comes in an almost infinite variety of types, forms and levels of severity. While women are the most common victims, men are by no means immune.

One of the most frequent types of workplace discrimination is harassment of one form or another. Verbal harassment generally takes the form of one employee aiming hurtful and/or offensive words at another, either in private or in front of other employees.

There have been some explosive allegations aimed at a California lawmaker by his former chief of staff. The former employee claims that he was wrongfully terminated after he spoke up about sexual misconduct by the lawmaker toward other employees.

Not only is sexual harassment still a big problem in the nation's workplaces, retaliation for reporting sexual harassment is also an ongoing issue. Around 75 percent of victims say they've experienced retaliation for filing a complaint.

In California, employees doing similar work for the same company should be paid similar amounts. This is true in many cases even if, say, Employee A has a master's degree while Employee B has a bachelor's. The same idea applies to something such as one year of experience versus five years of experience upon hire.

Employers used to deploy such measures as a way to pay some employees more. Often, these employees would be white and male. Now California has also banned salary history inquiries, meaning that employers cannot ask you about your salary history. If you volunteer the history, the employer can use that as one factor in deciding what to pay you. Employers must also offer pay scales to job candidates upon reasonable request. This helps you self-select for jobs and should cut down on pay discrepancies for employees doing similar work. All that said, what if you find out that you make less money than one of your co-workers performing similar work? What should you do?