State Pay Equity Compliance for Employers: Addressing Pay Gaps and Conducting Privileged Pay Audits

Course Details
- smart_display Format
On-Demand
- signal_cellular_alt Difficulty Level
Intermediate
- work Practice Area
Employment and Workers Comp
- event Date
Wednesday, August 9, 2023
- schedule Time
1:00 p.m. ET./10:00 a.m. PT
- timer Program Length
90 minutes
-
This 90-minute webinar is eligible in most states for 1.5 CLE credits.
This CLE course will guide employment counsel through the national patchwork of pay equity statutes and discuss recent trends in state equal pay laws, including a detailed analysis of the language and responsibilities of these laws.
Faculty

Ms. Bastone assists companies in the preparation of affirmative action plans for federal contractors including job group analyses, EEO-1 classifications, utilization analyses, compensation analyses and adverse impact analyses.

Ms. Mantoan is Of Counsel in Orrick's Employment Law & Litigation group, working across the San Francisco and Portland offices. She focuses on high-stakes employment litigation, compliance counseling, and litigation avoidance measures. Ms. Mantoan's practice has a particular emphasis on complex class actions and developing areas of the law including pay equity and pay transparency, and she co-chairs Orrick's Pay Equity Task Force.

Mr. Patrick partners with employers on practical solutions to ensure equal employment opportunity (EEO), including counseling on affirmative action, pay equity and transparency, and diversity. In short, he develops actionable strategies under privilege that identify and eliminate unseen barriers to EEO in personnel practices—often informed by trends in employee data. Mr. Patrick’s work focuses on developing affirmative action programs, proactive pay analyses, diversity analyses, statistical evaluation of employment practices, and defending U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Federal Contracts Compliance Programs (OFCCP) compliance reviews. He has successfully guided many federal contractors through hundreds of OFCCP audits, including Corporate Management Compliance Evaluations, on-site investigations, focused reviews, compensation scrutiny, and hiring discrimination investigations. Mr. Patrick also provides advice and counsel related to potential risks of reduction in force, latent liabilities in target acquisition employment practices, and other analytics in the context of client mergers, acquisitions, and other restructuring.
Description
All states now have a pay equity statute after the last holdout, Mississippi, enacted legislation in 2022. Further, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has stepped up enforcement and oversight to ensure compliance with the laws.
Employers are increasingly using confidential pay audits to examine their payrolls and pay practices for illegal wage disparities between genders, races, and groups of protected employees. Pay audits are an excellent tool if performed correctly; without them, employers risk failing to detect potential pay differences that may correlate to factors like gender, race, or ethnicity.
Pay equity laws generally bar employers from paying workers differently for comparable or substantially similar work absent a legal justification for that disparity, but what amounts to "substantially similar" work is difficult to define.
Listen as our distinguished panel discusses state equal pay laws and how employers and their counsel can spot potential pay equity issues by conducting a pay audit. Additionally, our speakers will analyze strategies for employers to achieve and maintain compliance with equal pay laws after identifying a potential pay equity issue.
Outline
- Definition of the pay gap and how it differs from pay equity
- The state of state laws
- Conducting privileged pay audits
- Best practices for employers and counsel to address potential pay equity issues between employees
Benefits
The panel will review these and other hot topic issues:
- What are the variations in state pay equity laws?
- What groups are protected by pay equity laws?
- How can employers determine whether their hiring and pay setting practices are lawful?
- What steps can employers take to address potential pay equity issues?
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