United States: New York Judge Dismisses EEOC Equal Pay Suit On The Pleadings

Last week, Judge Buchwald of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed an EEOC case against the Port Authority for alleged Equal Pay Act violations related to pay disparities between male and female lawyers working at the Authority. In the decision, Judge Buchwald chided the EEOC for making cursory allegations that all of the nonsupervisory attorneys performed "equal work." The decision notes that "the jobs need not be identical, but they also may not simply be comparable." The EEOC's pleadings failed to adequately plead that all of the lawyers at the Authority, at varying levels of skill and experience, had jobs which were "substantially equal in skill, effort and responsibility," a requirement for a claim under the Equal Pay Act.

This case is a good example of the difficulties in bringing a claim under the Equal Pay Act, unless the comparators are in lockstep positions with the exact same responsibilities and duties. Here, the EEOC argued that lawyers all must pass the bar exam, and perform roughly the same duties, hence are equal. Not surprisingly, the court easily rejected such an elementary analysis, which would be laughable to anyone who has ever practiced law in a corporate law department or firm. The court concluded: "It strains credulity to argue that the Port Authority, which does not set wages based on a lockstep scale, does not factor into its pay decisions the kind and quality of work its attorneys perform."

It is good to see a common sense decision in what was clearly a reach by the EEOC. That said, one takeaway from this case is that the EEOC may not look very hard into distinguishing skill sets and experience within job classifications in analyzing equal pay cases. To avoid litigation altogether, employers may want to consider relying on different titles or levels (such as "senior " or "lead") to justify significant disparities in pay between workers performing similar work.

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