When I began practicing employment law 26 years ago, I represented both employees and employers on a range of workplace matters, including alleged practices related to unequal pay. What I learned was that worker pay was and is a complex and ever-evolving subject. For the past 11 years, I have been a full-time neutral, working, in large part, to mediate and resolve some of the most complex equal pay and related claims.
The Equal Pay Act of 1963 was intended to ensure pay equity for women in the workforce, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it unlawful to discriminate against workers on the basis of gender. Those laws were buttressed by the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. In April, Mississippi became the 50th state to enact a law barring discrimination in workers’ pay, yet we continue to see lawsuits alleging unequal pay based on gender, race, and other protected classifications.
In the last two or three years, I’ve seen a marked uptick in the number of claims asserting alleged pay discrimination, an increase that coincides with a broader rise in employee activism that occurred both before and...
Not even a week after his last serious on-air apology, Stephen A. Smith is right back at it. In a video posted to his YouTube channel over the weekend, Smith offered a correction and apology to ES...