Equal pay for equal work…point by point! Équité salariale

Equal pay for equal work…point by point! Équité salariale

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Pay equity or as they say in French Équité salariale is one of the more interesting things that our government has produced is a way of measuring the value of a category of work for a given business. This system is supposed to be used to eliminate inequality between stereotypically gender biased job types…i.e. secretaries are girls and mechanics are boys. And since boy-work is harder mechanics are paid more…

While sexism is an important issue, the real value of this process is to give management a clear view of how much their employees are making relative to how hard their work is, inside the company!

The boring part here is the mechanics…but here’ a brief explanation.

So the above graph shows the median pay for the enterprise in question which we’re going to call The Most Amazing Stuff Ever Made inc. or MASEM inc.

We distribute points to six sub factors, training required, experience required, intellectual effort, environmental factors, physical risk, physical difficulty, and responcibility. We then weight these sub factors and assign a value to the category of employment.

Looking a the chart we see MASEM has 9 different categories of employment. Five blue, that’ for boys, and four pink, that’s for girls. Then we follow the x-axis and see points between 400-820. That’s a measure of how hard the job is based on a number of sub-factors that we use to assign points to a category.

On the y-axis we measure the money distributed to the different categories after taking into account hourly wages and benefits. Oddly enough there is a rather consistent internal logic in this company as the lowest earner is getting around 16.50/hr for 430 points of value attributed the their work; and the highest earners in the company are making around 33$/hr for their 820 points of work value. But we see there are categories that are over paid for their work and people that are under paid for their work…. Oddly enough it’s the boys that are penalised in this company.

Something for MASEM management to consider the next time they have to consider their pay raises and annual reviews of their employees.

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