278 Human Resources Management for Public and Nonprofi t Organizations
public service positions. Yet these skills are typically excluded from job
evaluation forms, job descriptions, and performance evaluations so the work
is invisible and uncompensated. They refer to this as emotional labor.
To eliminate these biases, compensable factors must be reevaluated.
Otherwise organizations risk incorporating these inequities into future job
evaluation procedures.
The federal courts have not recognized comparable worth as a statu-
tory requirement under the Equal Pay Act or Title VII of the Civil Rights
Act of 1964. However, various legislative bodies have acted to remedy
pay disparities across jobs of similar value to the organization. In 1984,
Congress enacted the Pay Equity and Management Act, refl ecting the fed-
eral government ’ s interest in comparable worth. In 1987, the U.S. Federal
Employee Compensation Study Commission Act examined and attempted
to promote equitable pay practices within the federal workforce. This leg-
islation was followed by the Federal Equitable Pay Practices Act of 1988,
which directed a study to determine the extent to which wages are affected
across the board by gender and determine the role this infl uence may
play in the formation of wage differentials between male - and female -
dominated jobs (Kovach & Millspaugh, 1990).
Several state and local governments have passed legislation requiring
that public jobs be paid according to their worth to the organization. An
investigation by the State of Minnesota found that grain inspectors for the
state were at the same job evaluation level as administrative secretaries,
but they were paid three hundred dollars more per month. Each state job
was evaluated using skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions as
the compensable factors. Despite similar internal value scores, men were
paid more throughout state positions. To correct the disparity, in 1982 the
Minnesota legislature passed a comparable worth law for state employees.
The law required equitable compensation relationships between compa-
rable male - dominated and female - dominated jobs.
In 1984, the Minnesota legislature enacted another law, this one requir-
ing other public employers, such as city and county governments, public
utilities, libraries, hospitals, and school districts, to develop plans to insti-
tute pay equity and implement those plans by 1987 (Aho, 1989; Watkins,
1992). Rhode Island followed in 1990, when it amended its classifi cation
and pay plan to authorize classifi cation and pay increases for seventy job
categories traditionally held by females.
Although no federal legislation exists that mandates equal pay for
comparable worth, the Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act were
introduced in Congress.