Sen. Brad Hoylman (27th Senate District) joined the PowHerNY Equal Pay Campaign call last week to discuss the contractor reporting of equal pay data bill, NY Senate Bill S6059A / A. 8487 Glick, that he is sponsoring. This bill relates to equal pay disclosure with respect to state contracts requiring businesses and organizations bidding to be required, as a condition to winning a bid, to submit data on employee compensation to the New York State Comptroller. Also included in the bill:

• The data will include compensation broken down by gender, race, ethnicity, and any other information deemed necessary by the Comptroller. The data will be reported in a format that protects individual worker privacy and businesses’ proprietary information.
• The Comptroller will annually submit a report on the data collected to the Governor, the Legislature, the Attorney General, and several state agencies, any of which may use the data to ensure that existing wage equity laws are being enforced.
• The annual reports and the data contained in them will be available for public inspection.

For decades, state and federal laws have prohibited wage discrimination on the basis of gender, as well as race and ethnicity. In spite of these laws, however, a gender wage gap has persisted.

In 1963, women made 59 cents for every dollar men made. In 2013 – 50 years after the Equal Pay Act was signed into law by President John F. Kennedy women still made an average of just 78 cents for every dollar made by men, with an even greater disparity existing between white male and African American and Hispanic female employees. In over a half century of equal pay being the law of the land, the gender wage gap hasn’t even been closed halfway.

Requiring prospective state contractors to disclose whether wage gaps exist in their organizations will create transparency and accountability in the state contracting process by allowing New Yorkers to see if their tax dollars are going to companies with disparities in employee pay by gender, race, or ethnicity. It will also create an incentive for contractors who would like to do business with New York State to take action internally to address the unconscious or conscious biases that may result in a wage gap. Within the past few years, cities like Albuquerque, New Mexico have introduced similar legislation. In 2014, the White House announced that federal contractors would have to report similar data to the federal government.

Stay tuned for efforts you can take locally to push for passage of this legislation here in New York by  signing up for PowHerNY’s weekly eblasts to get updates directly into your inbox.