A federal district court recently held that an employer violated federal and Vermont equal pay provisions by paying a female employee’s successor more than it paid her. In Dreves v. Hudson Group (HG) Retail, LLC, a female manager successfully argued that she was discriminated against when her employer hired her replacement and paid the new employee a starting salary that was higher than the salary that she made after having worked at the company for seven years. The Equal Pay Act, passed by Congress in 1963, prohibits employers from discriminating among employees on the basis of sex by paying higher wages to employees of the opposite sex for performing equivalent work. The purpose of the act was to eliminate the long-held societal view that men should be paid more than women when performing the same work. If an employer can show that the pay difference is due to a seniority system, a merit system, a system that measures quantity or quality of production, or ‘any factor other than sex’ the employer will not be found to have violated the Equal Pay Act. In Dreves, employer Hudson Group Retail, LLC argued that there was no discrimination, primarily because they had to lure this employee in by offering him a high starting salary, and that he was simply a better negotiator than the female employee. The Court granted the Plaintiff’s Motion for Summary Judgment finding that inducing the employee to accept the job, and superior negotiation skills could not explain the entirety of pay gap between the two employees, where the female manager had significantly more experience than the male employee at the time that she was hired. Employees should take note that to establish a violation of the Equal Pay Act it is not necessary to provide direct evidence of any kind of discriminatory intent or animosity towards women. Unlike other discrimination laws, to state a case under the Equal Pay Act requires only that an employee show that i) the employer pays different wages to employees of the opposite sex; ii) the employees perform equal work on jobs requiring equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and iii) the jobs are performed under similar working conditions. Female employees should remember that there may be recourse when a male counterpart or successor is paid more than a female co-worker for doing the same work.
