Back to the Bargaining Table

By Amy Wilentz.

Nurse and parole agent, stenographer and highway-equipment cleaner, secretary and tree trimmer: advocates of "comparable worth" contend that the women and men in such disparate jobs require similar degrees of education, skill and responsibility, and should be paid equivalent wages. That argument was set back last week when a three-judge federal appeals court unanimously overturned the nation's first ruling in favor of comparable worth. The court decided that an employer could be ordered to use comparable-worth pay standards only in cases of proven discrimination.

The new ruling affects some 15,500 employees of the state of Washington. Most of them are women who were eligible for comparable-worth salary hikes, plus back pay that could have amounted to $1 billion, under a 1983 decision by Federal District Court Judge Jack Tanner in Tacoma. The latest decision may influence three pending comparable-worth cases in California and New York, involving approximately 96,000 workers. Opponents of comparable worth, which President Reagan once called "a cockamamie idea," were gleeful. "There isn't a single valid court opinion now upholding the concept," said William Bradford Reynolds, Assistant Attorney General for civil rights. For Jerry Jasinowski, executive vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers, the ruling reaffirmed economic principles: "You cannot ignore the marketplace when deciding how much to pay an employee who fills a particular job."

Organized labor and women's groups see comparable worth in a different light. Eleanor Smeal, president of the National Organization for Women, said her group would "raise hell" over the decision, and lauded the concept as a tool that women can use "to break out of the ghetto of low wages." Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a plaintiff in the Washington suit, called comparable worth "pay equity for workingwomen." McEntee said the union intends to appeal last week's decision to the Supreme Court.

The 18,000-member AFSCME affiliate in Washington supported nine workers who sued the state for pay discrimination in 1982, basing their case on a 1974 state-commissioned report that had found that state workers in job categories dominated by women were paid 20% less than those in male-dominated categories. Before the suit came to trial, the Washington legislature agreed to a plan that would gradually raise women's wages over the next ten years. Nonetheless, Judge Tanner ruled that it was time for pay equity "right now." He found that "the state of Washington has . . . a compensation system which discriminates on the basis of sex," and ordered the state to award back pay to all affected workers.

In last week's reversal, Appeals Court Judge Anthony Kennedy wrote that Washington "has not been shown to have been motivated by impermissible sex- based considerations in setting salaries." He also ruled that "a study which indicates a particular wage structure might be more equitable should not categorically bind the employer who commissioned it."

Although comparable worth has for the moment been stymied in the courts, states and cities are putting the idea into practice through legislation and collective bargaining. Comparable-worth policies have already been put into effect in Minnesota, Iowa, New York, Wisconsin and Connecticut. But Kennedy's decision worries Winn Newman, an attorney for the Washington workers: "Without the threat of litigation, collective bargaining over pay equity will go nowhere. Employers won't give you something just because it's a just and fair thing to do."

With reporting by David Beckwith/Washington and Cristina Garcia/San Francisco