Proposed Ordinance Will Force Santa Clara Co. Contractors To Give Equal Pay

Santa Clara County and San Jose leaders plan to introduce an equal pay ordinance to echo efforts being made at the state and federal levels.

County supervisors Dave Cortese and Cindy Chavez on Friday announced a Gender and Ethnicity Pay Equity Ordinance that will be presented to the board at its Sept. 15 meeting. The ordinance would make sure that any company that has a contract with the county gives equal pay to its workers regardless of their gender or ethnicity.

If passed, the ordinance would require the county to check contractors for any disparities in pay or unjust hiring practices through audits, Cortese said. The goal of the ordinance is to make sure there is equality among contractors and more than 17,000 county employees, he said.

Almost half of the county’s current $5.6 billion budget is set aside for outside contractors, Cortese said. Women make up two-thirds of the people across the country working on a minimum wage and four out of every 10 people in charge at home, Chavez said. If women don’t receive equal pay, their children and generations of families are shortchanged, she said.

“When an employer isn’t paying a fair wage we end up subsidizing that through our taxes and we don’t think we should do that anymore,” Chavez said. “Taxpayers shouldn’t be footing the bill for cheap employers,” she said.

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The county has the highest number of reports of wage theft of any region in California, said Esther Peralez-Dieckmann, director of the county’s Office of Women’s Policy.

San Jose City Councilman Don Rocha said he plans to submit a memorandum to introduce a city gender pay equity ordinance that he hopes will be discussed during next week’s Rules and Open Government Committee meeting next week.

The city ordinance would apply to city employees and/or city contractors, and require them to assess current hiring and promoting practices and the best practices that lead to gender pay equity, Rocha said.

Assemblywoman Nora Campos, D-San Jose, said to help combat gender pay inequity she has introduced Assembly Bill 1017, which would prohibit employers from asking potential hires about their previous salary. Instead, employers will look at a person’s qualifications, ability and skill set for a position, Campos said.

The bill is set for a vote on the Senate floor next week. The Equal Pay Act was signed in 1963 prohibiting wage disparity on the basis of gender but there are still pay differences between men and women more than 50 years since the law was passed, said Elmy Bermejo, regional representative for U.S. Secretary of Labor Tom Perez.

“From 1963 to 2013 the wage gap between women and men has closed by just 19 percentage points and it’s estimated that at this rate it will take until 2058 to close the wage parity,” Bermejo said.

In 2010, President Obama created the National Equal Pay Enforcement Task Force with representatives from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Department of Justice, Department of Labor and Office of Personnel Management, Bermejo said.

The task force has a working group dedicated to enforcing wage discrimination laws, according to Bermejo.

--Bay City News

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