7.5 - Low-Wage Work

Diane, a mother of three, was standing in the prep room of the Wal-Mart deli where she worked in Florida. The room was sparsely set up with a big double sink, walk-in cooler, freezer, a couple of preparation tables, and a hand-washing sink. Regulation white walls, a double door to the warehouse, and a single swinging door to the customer area completed the twenty-fivesquare foot concrete-floored room.

She and two other women who worked together at the deli were getting ready for the day, taking food out of the freezer, opening packages of meat, and putting together food trays. A young man about eighteen years old, a new hire, walked through the double swinging doors from the warehouse muttering complaints under his breath. Diane recalls, “He was saying, ‘They want me to do this, and they want me to do that, all for this small amount of money. And then he said his pay.’ We were all like, ‘What! That’s how much they hired you at!?’ ” His pay was much higher than theirs.

When hired, all the women were told it was store policy to start everyone at the same wage of $6.50 per hour. And the women knew for a fact that another recent hire in their department, a woman with eleven years experience, was hired at that rate (as were they). When they accidentally found out the young man was hired for quite a bit more, the women were upset.

Like Diane, they were all mothers who dearly needed their wages to support their children and families. They were more than upset; they were outraged.

Gender inequality in the workplace is far from a thing of the past.

Despite the data that shows wage gaps, some question whether or not wage inequalities between men and women still exist. Societal trends are easier to see when large numbers of workers’ wages are considered at the same time. So let’s look at the company where Diane works, Wal-Mart, which is our nation’s largest private employer. Wal-Mart has more than 3,000 stores around the country, and as many as 1.6 million women have worked for Wal-Mart since 1998.

In 2001, six current and former female Wal-Mart employees filed a national sex-discrimination class-action lawsuit, alleging widespread gender bias against women with regard to pay, job assignments, and promotions. This lawsuit, Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., is ongoing and active. According to a statistical report prepared by Dr. Richard Drogin, the plaintiffs’ expert in the Wal-Mart case, “Women employees at Wal-Mart are concentrated in the lower paying jobs, are paid less than men in the same jobs and are less likely to advance to management positions than men. These gender patterns persist even though women have more seniority, have lower turnover rates, and have higher performance ratings in most jobs.”

Wal-Mart on Trial
by Irma Herrera, Executive Director, Equal Rights Advocates, Inc.


In June 2001 Betty Dukes and five other current and former employees of Wal-Mart filed a lawsuit on behalf of themselves and a class of other women workers charging Wal-Mart with systematically discriminating against its female employees in promotions, compensation, and training in its over 3,300 Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club retail stores nationwide in violation of federal anti-discrimination law (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964).

In support of their Motion to Certify the Class, plaintiffs provided sworn testimony from women who worked in 184 Wal-Mart stores in thirty different states around the country, as well as the depositions of more than 100 Wal-Mart managers and executives whose testimony was taken under oath and from payroll data and over 1,200,000 pages of documents produced by Wal-Mart from it’s corporate files.

Wal-Mart’s own workforce data revealed that women in every major job category at Wal-Mart have been paid less than men with the same seniority in every year since 1997, even though female employees on average have higher performance ratings and less turnover than men. Wal-Mart’s internal documents also acknowledged that the corporation was “behind the rest of the world” in the promotion of women.

Wal-Mart appealed the class certification to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and arguments on the appeal were heard in August 2005. As of the end of 2005, the Ninth Circuit had not yet issued a decision.

Diane and her co-workers aren’t part of that lawsuit. For many Wal-Mart workers, lawsuits seem remote, and they don’t want to complicate their lives, which are already too demanding. What they did do after accidentally uncovering wage inequality was ask for a meeting with the store manager.

On the day they asked for the meeting they searched all over the store for the manager and couldn’t find him. Finally, towards the end of the day, they were called into the manager’s office. He was absent, but in his place were four men from the main management division. There was only one other woman invited to the meeting, and she was from the personnel office.

The division managers were all sitting around a conference room table on cold metal chairs when Diane and her co-workers walked in. There was an empty desk at the end of the room, and for some odd reason the main decorative feature of the office was a life-size cutout of a racecar driver. The women sat down and were “yelled at” by the managers: “We were told if we were ever caught discussing our pay again it was grounds for termination. They were very agitated and weren’t sympathetic at all. It was like we did something wrong. But we never even asked about pay, he just came out and said it. All we ever wanted to do was talk to the store manager and we never got to,” recalls Diane.

Diane later found out that under Florida law, discussing pay is not grounds for termination, as it is in many states. In a recent phone conversation, Amy Caiazza, from The Institute for Women’s Policy Research, shared her thoughts from a national perspective: “Right now, in many instances, you can be fired for disclosing your salary. That means most people don’t know what their co-workers are making. It’s generally very difficult to know whether you are being discriminated against.”

The Legal System In Action
by Professor Joan Williams, Director of Center for WorkLife Law at U.C. Hastings College of Law, and Donna Norton, Esq., Consultant to the Center for WorkLife Law


Like Kiki, the single mother of two who faced repeated discrimination while looking for a job, many mothers continue to face bias at the workplace. More and more, women are beginning to use the legal system to fight this discrimination. For example, one woman sued when her employer said that he didn’t believe mothers should work because “I don’t see how you can do either job well.” Another sued after being fired because “she was no longer dependable since she had a child.” We’ve all heard about the glass ceiling, but many women are stopped long before by the “maternal wall.”

Maternal wall lawsuits have increased 300 percent since 2000, as compared to the prior five years. In one case, a female civil engineer was awarded $3 million because she was passed over for promotions after the birth of her son. She testified that she was given a choice between the career track and the mommy track when the president of the company asked her, “Do you want to have babies or do you want a career here?”

Currently, mothers are suing under a patchwork of laws, and their success depends on the laws of their state and the views of the court that decides their case. The employment discrimination section of the District of Columbia Human Rights Act is the only state statute that specifically prohibits discrimination against employees on the basis of “family responsibilities.” What is needed are state and federal laws that specifically forbid discrimination against mothers and other employees with family caregiving responsibilities. This will not only protect the rights of mothers and other caregivers, but also help employers by clearly defining what policies and practices are legal.

Caiazza offers a solution to the problem. “There is a bill on Capital Hill that would protect people so they won’t be fired for talking about how much money they make. The bill also requires companies to analyze their salaries and wages and to disclose that data so potential patterns of discrimination can be seen. This is a very simple thing to do.”

It’s often difficult for individuals to see gendered wage inequality. Generally, people don’t compare their paychecks at the water fountain, and questioning why one person makes more than another is far from common. That’s why comparing wages in large corporations like Wal-Mart is so very revealing about our current status.

So what, you might be wondering, does the wage gap between men and women have to do with motherhood? A close look at the numbers shows that the reason the wage gap is so large for all women is that the vast majority of women become mothers (82 percent).31 This majority of American women— mothers—are actually making less than the current average reported by the U.S. Census of 76 cents to a man’s dollar,32 since the wages of non-mothers bring up the overall average.

In fact, as we’ve noted, right now the wage gap between mothers and non-mothers is greater than between women and men—and it’s actually getting bigger. Non-mothers earn 10 percent less than their male counterparts; mothers earn 27 percent less; and single mothers earn between 34 percent and 44 percent less.33 The wage gap, to a large degree, is therefore a direct reflection of bias against working mothers. This bias, in part, is because we don’t have family-friendly policies to support the needs of working mothers and families, like flexible work options, paid family leave, and accessible childcare.

But even if we put gender inequality aside (and that’s one heck of a big aside), there’s something terribly amiss when the nation’s largest employer has a significant number of employees needing, and qualifying for, food stamps and other government subsidies in order to support their families while working fulltime. This scenario of full-time Wal-Mart workers on public assistance is playing out in states across the nation, which means taxpayers are subsidizing Wal-Mart’s profits.

Diane’s starting wage of $6.50 per hour adds up to $13,520 per year if she doesn’t take any unpaid time off and works all fiftytwo weeks of the year at our nation’s largest employer. Very few families can live on $13,520 per year.

In blinding contrast, Wal-Mart CEO and President, H. Lee Scott Jr. made $22, 991,599 in 2004.34 Yes, that’s nearly $23 million. It is clear from the CEO’s salary that Wal-Mart does not pay low wages to its regular workers because it’s struggling to make a profit, but because it’s good for investors and the top management. Taxpayers shouldn’t have to subsidize thriving businesses.