Human Resource Development Scenario.
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Recently, Jim Thompson has joined a large company as a chief operating officer– HRD. The person who worked on this post before Mr. Thompson was holding this position for the past 16 years. He has retired and hence Mr. Thompson was recruited to take on the position. Soon after Mr. Thompson joined, he found that there is inequity in the pay structure of female and male supervisors. The female supervisors were being paid lower than any of the male supervisors. Mr. Thompson evaluated the job responsibilities of both male and female supervisors and found that there was no difference in the job responsibilities of both the genders. This signified that the company is being unfair as far as wages are concerned towards the female supervisors. He knew that if these women supervisors took this matter to the concerned law authorities, the company would be charged of female discrimination. The best part was that these women were not aware of this discrimination meted out to them and were quite satisfied with their jobs and were dedicated to the company.
The question here is whether Mr. Thompson should keep quiet and let the HR department run in the same manner in which the earlier chief operating officer–HRD was running it, or increase the salary of women supervisors either gradually or immediately.
The first option i.e. to keep quiet is not the ethical thing to do. Though these women employees have not taken any actions until now due to their ignorance of any such law that can help in increasing their wages, there are chances of them being aware of all this one day. If this happens then it would become difficult to amicably solve the situation and the company will have to incur heavy monetary loss in legal lawsuits.
The suggestion is to adopt the second option i.e. to increase the wages of the female employees. The decision whether to increase the wages immediately or gradually should depend upon the collective opinion of the President of the company and other personnel of the HRD department. However, executing this work is not as easy as it seems. The top management might think that Mr. Thompson is increasing the costs of the company and is not efficient in managing the cost as his predecessor. The male supervisors might get upset with increase in wages of only the female supervisors.
To tackle this situation, Mr. Thompson should make everyone aware of the equal pay act that advocates prohibition of wage discrimination on the basis of sex of the employees. They should be made aware that if the company does not enforce this law then it can get into legal troubles and the monetary damaged incurred might be more than the increased wages of the female employees. All this can be enforced with the help of an affirmative action plan. Just word of mouth and meetings cannot remove the discrimination that has been meted out to the female supervisors over the years. “An affirmative action plan is a written document outlining specific goals and timetables for remedying past discriminatory actions.” (Rue and Byars, 1992, p. 304) If this strategy were adopted then in the long run the company would realize how it made good business sense to keep legal action and employee dissatisfaction at bay. The affirmative action plan would also help the male supervisors understand the importance and correctness of the decision. The situation would improve this way.
References
Rue, L.W., Byars, L.L. (6 Ed.). (1992). Management Skills and Application. USA:
IRWIN.
Stevens, G.E., (5 Ed.). (1991). Cases and Exercises in Human Resource Management.
USA: IRWIN.
