TITLE : FAIR PAY: THE MANAGERIAL CHALLENGE OF COMPARABLE JOB WORTH AND JOB EVALUATION.

I think socioeconomic change moves forward as forcefully as a train traversing the track. Trains can become derailed, stopped, or slowed down. But they move under momentum, and, more often than not, roll on to their destination.

Comparable job worth might well be viewed as a train chugging uphill but near the summit and ready to roll down the track at a fast speed very soon. If this scenario is realistic, the challenge for corporate management in America is whether it wishes to wave a flag from the caboose or to play a role as locomotive engineer and blower of the whistle as the train presses on to its destination in pay equity. However, policy-level executives, line and staff managers, and even human resource managers, who should be alert to developments in comparable job worth, do not seem to realize what is going on and how the public sector is moving very rapidly to implement male-female pay equity. Corporate management needs to know what is taking place and to decide what it wants to do before the trip is over. This book addresses this important need and is the first book of its kind: it provides a managerial perspective by a professor of management and human resources and an active pay consultant to corporate managers who are about to be directed to solve the multifarious problems of fair pay.

My purpose is to inform private-sector management of the comparable job worth challenge and the new roles of job evaluation in dealing with pay equity demanded by women in industry. I want to help management to cope with the challenge and implement new, appropriate policies.

This book will allow busy policy-level executives to learn about the managerial, legal, legislative, labor union, collective bargaining, and strategic business issues framing the comparable job worth panorama. It will provide middle managers in line and staff positions with useful information on how to understand why comparable job worth remains a persistent problem among American women in their employ. I set forth and explain techniques for solving the problems involved in pay equity for these readers because they will be expected to take corrective action. Human resource managers will find the book a current source of ideas, coping methods, and cases and facts-as well as a review of legislative developments. It will help them in staying up to date, formulating policies, and designing workable practices.

Whether the reader is at work in industry, government, the health care industry, the labor movement, education, the legal profession, management consulting, or even the armed forces or large religious organizations, there is material in Fair Pay that will shed light on why comparable job worth is a matter that must be addressed and resolved.

My highest hope is that my treatment of the topic might jolt American management into realizing that pay equity is virtually a fact of life in much of the public sector and that it is spreading to the remainder of the economy quite rapidly. Corporate management seems completely unaware of the momentum - and unprepared to act. It needs to know and to be ready. This book should assist readers in meeting these needs because it provides an up-to-date managerial treatment of the problem.

Overview of the Contents

The book begins with a careful examination of the many meanings of comparable job worth and concludes that, stripped of confusing connotations and fuzzy ideology, this concept means pay equity. Managers are organizational gatekeepers who can bring about pay equity at surprisingly low costs. Women have historically been subjected to-and have largely accepted - minority status that has included differential and unfair treatment itl the world of work. They and various supportive groups in contemporary society are now actively engineering important socioeconomic changes to stamp out sex-based pay discrimination. Through litigation women have obtained greater equity than ever before, although the U.S. Supreme Court has not yet endorsed comparable job worth. The changing composition of the Supreme Court may not be an impediment to a change in such endorsement if a case with the right fact pattern is presented to it.

Although the judiciary is at present not sending out new signals to corporate America, certainly the state legislatures and local government are doing so. The level of comparable worth activity there borders on the frantic, though somehow this is not being noticed in boardrooms and corporate offices, where the main concerns of business today are seen as foreign competition, the size of the deficit, the vicissitudes of the stock market, glasnost, global risk assessment, and the like. Yet state legislative activity on comparable worth has not been unnoticed by women's groups, labor unions, civil rights advocates, academics, and others whose focus of attention is less diffuse than that of corporate management. Unions have been using collective bargaining to further comparable job worth, and some pacesetting companies have quietly used job evaluation unilaterally-on their own-to resolve persistent problems of pay equity. Are these the preferred solutions to the problem? If they are not, what strategy is appropriate in a free society such as ours?

There are some new appreciations of job evaluation that have come about as a result of the struggle for pay equity since the 1960s. Job evaluation now has some new faces and facets. It certainly has been revived from the doldrums of the pre-1960 era. The totality of these developments leads one to conclude that pay equity will come tomorrow-as soon as the l990s. Such an assertion may seem indefensible to readers who are not on top of the fast- moving trends in comparable job worth and who would expect such fundamental change to come along at the pace of a glacier. But that is what this book is all about. Moreover, I hope that it heightens awareness and interest on the part of American management and is put on the business reader's list of "must" reading.

How This Book Came About

I have been interested in the field of compensation for more than thirty-five years and have followed the growth of the comparable job worth issue very closely from 1976 to the present. In these years I have benefited greatly from personal contacts with some of the most knowledgeable attorneys in the employment law field in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Fort Worth, Denver, and Washington, D.C. More limited contact with Donald J. Treiman of UCLA and Alvin O. Bellak (formerly of the Hay Group) has also been helpful. Time off for research granted by the School of Labor and Industrial Relations at Michigan State University during the fall quarter of 1986 when I was on the faculty there helped me prepare an outline for the book and read widely in source materials. A graduate seminar on comparable job worth that I taught in the summer quarter of 1986 while at SLIR-MSU provided me with an opportunity to concretize what I really thought about the subject and to invite criticisms from an astute group of doctoral and master's degree candidates, several of whom were practitioners in human resources.

Gene L. Houser, chair of the Department of Management and Human Resources, and Ronald W. Eaves, dean of the College of Business Administration, of the California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, gave me consideration in course scheduling and complete freedom of action to bring this book to completion during 1987-88.

Most of the writing was done in my home in Kaunakakai, Molokai, Hawaii, during the summer of 1987. Susan M. Foster of Claremont, California, ably performed all the word processing. William H. Hicks and Mary L. White of Jossey-Bass were constant supporters, and their encouragement and follow-up were crucial to completion of the book.

Claremont, California Thomas H. Patten, Jr. September 1988