With the judge’s certification of the class action complaint, nine thousand women can now sue Disney collectively for fair pay. While the Equal Pay Act of California is at the heart of this case, it is also against the law to pay women less than men or vice versa on a federal level.
The human resources department at Disney is large, and it’s staffed with compensation specialists and can conduct frequent statistical analysis. However, plaintiffs continue to assert that wage discrepancies go against job families.
Job families are intended as a categorizing or grouping of related job positions within an organization which possess similar characteristics, skills, responsibilities, and career paths.
This should make it fairly easy to do analyses to ensure that pay is fair across job families. Disney, however, created rather sprawling job families. An article in Variety states that Felicia Davis, an attorney for Disney, contended in court “that just because two employees are in the same job family and level, that does not mean their work is ‘substantially similar.’”
Davis pointed out that the plaintiffs were involved in a wide variety of professions, such as pastry chefs, architects, engineers, visual effects directors, nurses, dog handlers, nurse practitioners, and social media managers.
“These are different segments, different business areas, in different locations,” she said. “They report to different managers. They are in completely different industries which pay completely differently.”
The issue here is that these ladies are all members of the same occupational family, but they play very distinct responsibilities. Janette S. Levey, an employment attorney, disagrees with Davis and does not regard this as a defence.
“In a weird way, that very argument may actually help the plaintiffs. If a job group includes dissimilar jobs, the EEOC often sees that as a red flag when it scrutinizes pay practices. It appears Disney has grouped dissimilar jobs into the same group(s) and then seeks to hide behind that to avoid accountability for potential systemic pay discrimination,” she posted on her LinkedIn account.
Levey says this system essentially argues, “Well, I’m too disorganized for you to tell whether I’m doing anything wrong, so you can’t touch me.”
Disney might lose a tonne of money due to their inconsistent compensation plans.
The courts will decide, if the lawsuit proceeds to that stage, whether Disney is paying women less than men. Avoiding this would have been possible with a well-defined and rational compensation plan that included frequent reviews to check for pay equity and consistency.
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