The US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals this week ruled that Fresno County could not pay an individual female employee less than a male counterpart because of the woman’s lower salary history. An 11-judge panel of the San Francisco-based court unanimously ruled that doing so would violate the federal Equal Pay Act of 1963 and further that prior salary is a “second-rate surrogate” for legitimate job-related factors such as experience, training, education or prior performance and that only those job-related factors should be considered when setting salaries. We can expect that more jurisdictions will continue to add salary history bans to their books, as 8 did in 2017 – 4 states (California, Delaware, Massachusetts & Oregon) and 4 cities (Albany, New York City, Philadelphia & San Francisco).
