A judge has allowed for 9000 women to sue Disney for pay disparity. The plaintiffs say that Disney did not uphold California’s Equal Pay Act and discriminated against women. “Disney says that you can’t compare jobs over multiple sectors because it depends on the manager” (Maddus). This can be seen as a cop-out because the company should have a standard rate for each job. The lawyer also says that because the workers work together at the same job level, they do not have the same amount of work. Because of education, time of hire, tenure, or how long the person has been working there. Both of these sides have an expert that says there is a gender wage pay gap and that there isn’t one. The claim is that managers could use past pay history to be able to set pay for Disney jobs. While Disney says it could be used, it was never required, so the company shouldn’t be at fault.
In my opinion, do workers have a case to win? In my opinion, they may have a chance to win this suit, but if they do, Disney will probably blame it on the managers, which seems like they are already doing. And also, with a class action lawsuit like this, it will probably take a few years to be settled.
But it just shows that no matter how far as a country we advance, there is still gender discrimination that can happen. Especially regarding wages, it is interesting that managers can base the employee pay upon past pay. I don’t know if that’s illegal or not. The article did not say anything about it being illegal. So I guess they can do that, but to me, it seems like a gray era, which is one reason I think the lawsuit will win.
https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/disney-gender-pay-lawsuit-class-certification-approved-1235830178/
I wonder what enabled these women to in a sense develop collective identities. They realized they were all women and weren’t being paid equally across genders. It would be interesting to see how they all came to this realization and formed a class action, especially since income is often a sensitive subject.