Under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, workers have a right to organize a union to negotiate with employers. So how can so many workplaces impose gag rules, prohibiting employees from discussing pay with one another?
In When the Boss Says, ‘Don’t Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid’, a recent article in The Atlantic, Jonathan Timm argues:
Gag rules…are policies that flourish when employers know the law and their employees do not.
Timm goes on to explain:
the NLRA is toothless and employers know it. When employees file complaints, the National Labor Relations Board’s “remedies” are slaps on the wrist: reinstatement for wrongful termination, back-pay, and/or “informational remedies” such as “the posting of a notice by the employer promising to not violate the law.”
At the same time, ignorance of the law can just as easily fuel gag rules. Craig Becker, general counsel for the AFL-CIO, used to serve on the National Labor Relations Board. He told me that workers who called the NLRB rarely were aware that their employer’s pay secrecy policy was unlawful.
Gag laws achieve a lot for employers who want to keep workers feeling isolated and vulnerable. It helps preserve a power imbalance that keeps workers divided and precarious. In the article, Timm suggests another reason:
Ariane Hegewisch is the study director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the author of several reports on pay secrecy and wage discrimination. One of the reasons she sees behind the pay gap is that, five decades after the Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex, old-fashioned workplace beliefs still justify sexist pay distribution. For example, in one case, in which a group of women sued Walmart for sexist discrimination in pay and promotions, women testified that their managers said men “are working as the heads of their households, while women are just working for the sake of working,” even though women are now the sole or primary breadwinners in around 40 percent of American households.
…
We don’t know whether gag rules directly cause wage discrimination, but they undoubtedly open the door to it. Employers who keep pay secret are free to set pay scales on arbitrary bases or fail to give well-deserved raises because of social norms. “When you don’t have transparency and accountability,” Hegewisch told me, “employers react to these pressures and biases and women tend to lose out.”
Read the full article at The Atlantic.
