Philadelphia Promotes Pay Equity With New Law
The City of Brotherly Love has taken a historic step towards pay equity for women and minorities by passing a law that will ban employers from asking about applicants’ wage history. Mayor Jim Kenney signed the Wage Equity Law on Monday, even in the face of threats from city businesses of lawsuits to come.
Mayor Kenney signed a law that prohibits employers from asking about applicants’ wage history, a move that will hopefully increase pay equity for women and minorities.
In Philadelphia, women make only 79 cents for every dollar that men do. For minorities, the wage gap is even larger. Kenney and the City Council are trying to combat that fact and help women and minorities attain pay equity by disallowing prospective employers from asking what they have earned in the past. Doing so, the law posits, only allows new employers to keep employees’ salaries lower than they otherwise would be, perpetuating the cycle of inequality. Now, employers who break the law (which will take effect in May) face penalties of up to $2,000 if they get nosy about applicants’ wage history, as well as possibly being on the hook for legal fees.
Certain factions are not happy about the new law. Comcast, one of Philadelphia’s largest employers, threatened to sue to sue the city for allegedly breaking their First Amendment rights if the law were signed. Comcast has said that, without wage history, they would not know what to pay their top-level executives. Mayor Kenney addressed the legal threats when discussing the new law yesterday: “I know that Comcast and the business community are committed to ending wage discrimination, and I’m hopeful that moving forward we can have a better partnership on this and other issues of concern to business owners and their employees,” he said. “This doesn’t need to be an either/or argument — what is good for the people of Philadelphia is good for business, too.”
The Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce has also been critical of the new law, warning that the city is building a reputation for interfering in businesses’ ability to run themselves.
