The Late, Great Judge Reinhardt’s Legacy: Employers can no Longer Consider Prior Salary History in Setting Workers’ Wages

Stephen Reinhardt, known as the “liberal lion” of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals since his appointment by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, died last month, after authoring one last decision for the ages.

Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit published posthumously Judge Reinhardt’s final opinion, to combat the gender wage gap, by holding “that prior salary alone or in combination with other factors cannot justify a wage differential.” Rizo v. Yovino, No. 16-15372, Slip Op. at 5 (9th Cir. Apr. 9, 2018), available here. Bryan Schwartz Law previously blogged about the Ninth Circuit’s earlier decision in Rizo here.

            Despite decades of education, litigation, and mobilization to make the promise of equal work for equal pay a reality, the gender wage gap continues to disadvantage millions of women in our country, who earn only 79% of what men earn.[1] Women lose $33 billion per year due to the wage gap.[2] Judge Reinhardt’s words in Rizo will  now be the fulcrum of the national discussion over this stubborn, glaring problem.

In Rizo, the facts are undisputed: a county school district paid a female math consultant less than comparable male workers for the same work. Slip Op. at 6. All things being equal, the county’s decision would be a textbook violation of the federal Equal Pay Act. But, the county attempted to justify its decision by reference to a statutory catch-all exception to the federal Equal Pay Act, which allows for wage differences between male and female employees based on a “factor other than sex.” In particular, the county argued that the female employee’s prior salary history was a factor not rooted in sex, and thus could justify paying the female employee less than comparable male employees for the same work. Id. at 7. The initial three-judge Ninth Circuit panel agreed, citing its past decision in Kouba v. Allstate Ins. Co., 691 F.3d 873, 878 (9th Cir. 1982), in which the court declined to create a strict prohibition against the use of prior salary.

Undeterred, the advocates for pay equality petitioned for the Ninth Circuit to re-hear the case en banc,[3] which the court granted. After a second hearing, the en banc Ninth Circuit court rejected the county’s argument because an employer’s decision to rely on an applicant’s prior salary history to set that applicant’s present salary inevitably imports and thereby perpetuates unlawful disparities in pay from the applicant’s prior position. Id. at 28 (“Prior salary is not job related and it perpetuates the very gender-based assumptions about the value of work that the Equal Pay Act was designed to end. This is true whether prior salary is the sole factor or one of several factors considered in establishing employees’ wages.”).[4] This runs counter to the purpose of the Equal Pay Act, which was enacted to “to put an end to the ‘serious and endemic problem of employment discrimination in private industry’ and to carry out a broad mandate of equal pay for equal work regardless of sex.” Id. at 10 (quoting Corning Glass Works v. Brennan, 417 U.S. 188, 195 (1974)).[5]

Notably, in holding that employers “may not use sex directly or indirectly as a basis for establishing employees’ wages,” including using employees’ salary histories to set wages, the Ninth Circuit overruled its prior decision in Kouba. Id. at 23. This outcome not only paves the way for more effective enforcement of the Equal Pay Act’s mandate – equal pay for equal work, not equal salary histories – but also serves as a reminder that equity can sometimes only be achieved through fearless, persistent advocacy, and jurists like Stephen Reinhardt, who demonstrate the courage to pursue justice.

Bryan Schwartz Law congratulates Jennifer Reisch and Jessica Stender at Equal Rights Advocates, our co-counsel in a prior sex discrimination case, and Mariko Yoshihara of the California Employment Lawyers Association, along with the many other advocates for wage equality who brought about this momentous victory!

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[1] See https://www.equalrights.org/fairpay/

[2] Id.

[3] Most cases reviewed by a federal appellate circuit court are heard by fewer than the full number of judges sitting on a particular circuit court, usually a three-judge panel. However, parties may request that all judges sitting on a given federal circuit court, like the Ninth Circuit, re-hear their case because one or more parties believes the three-judge panel ruled incorrectly.

[4] The en banc court emphasized that the “factor other than sex” exception must be “limited to job-related factors,” not business reasons such as whether an employer could get away with paying a female worker less than male workers because the female worker was paid less at her previous job. Id. at 25 (“[U]sing the word “business” risks conflating a legitimate factor other than sex with any cost-saving mechanism. The Supreme Court and Congress have repeatedly rejected such an interpretation of the fourth exception.”).

[5] The en banc court also supported its decision with the plain text of the statute, and the legislative history of the Equal Pay Act, including specific debates relating to the catch-all exception at issue in Rizo.

Preliminary Injunction Against Trump’s Transgender Service Ban Shows How Federal Courts Are Our Last Line of Defense Against Discriminatory Executive Orders

The first 10 months of the Donald Trump Administration have been a sort of stress test for the resilience of the American constitutional system and the institutions charged with upholding it. We have seen an acting Attorney General resign rather than implement a plainly unconstitutional “Muslim ban,” and top Pentagon officials walk back Trump’s most belligerent threats of a nuclear attack against North Korea. But no institution has served a greater role in curbing the worst impulses of the Trump presidency than the federal courts, which have been repeatedly confronted with the Trump Administration’s cynical and authoritarian efforts to violate our core liberties and constitutional values: equal protection under the law, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion, to name a few.

In the most recent example, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia last week granted a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of President Trump’s Memorandum, which sought to ban all transgender individuals from serving in the U.S. military, effective March 2018. Under the Obama Administration, the Department of Defense went through a lengthy deliberation process and announced in June 2016 that transgender Americans could serve openly in the U.S. military, and that transgender recruits would no longer be turned away. The effect of the District Court’s Order is to preserve that status quo, such that current transgender troops will not be discharged in March and transgender recruits may join the military as soon as January.

In a detailed opinion, the Court determined that the Plaintiffs – current and aspiring transgender service members – were likely to succeed on their Fifth Amendment equal protection claims. The Court first determined that the Memorandum’s effect of disfavoring a class of historically persecuted individuals warranted heightened scrutiny. Then the Court concluded that the government could not meet such a standard, noting the unusual circumstances surrounding the announcement of the ban (i.e., it was announced via a series of Presidential tweets), the lack of factual support for the reasons proffered in favor of the ban, and the fact that the military itself had recently rejected those same reasons. The guiding principle in rejecting the ban is that “the Constitution’s guarantee of equality must at the very least mean that a bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group cannot justify disparate treatment of that group.” This principle has been applied to protect maligned groups from “hippies” (U.S. Dep’t of Agriculture v. Moreno) to the mentally disabled (City of Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center) to lesbians and gays (Romer v. Evans, Lawrence v.Texas, and U.S. v. Windsor). In short, Trump cannot prevent trans soldiers from serving their country simply because he, and his base, do not like trans people.

The courts have so far risen to the task of protecting these and other fundamental rights – blocking policies fueled by nothing more than bare hatred of Muslims, or immigrants, or LGBTQ individuals, among others. This was no guarantee: throughout their history, the federal courts, up to the Supreme Court, have repeatedly endorsed discrimination against unpopular groups, bowing to popular will or their own private bias in upholding Jim Crow laws (Plessy v. Ferguson), Japanese internment (Korematsu v. U.S.), and sodomy bans (Bowers v. Hardwick). The Supreme Court has sometimes later reversed course: rejecting “separate but equal” in Brown v. Board of Education, and recognizing a right to same-sex consensual sexual intimacy in Lawrence v. Texas. This history reminds us that we cannot take the courts for granted, or assume that they will consistently protect society’s most vulnerable.

So far, Trump has been his own worst enemy in the series of judicial challenges to his discriminatory executive orders. Courts had little trouble finding that the Muslim ban was fueled by discriminatory animus given Trump’s extensive campaign rhetoric and tweets indicating a desire to harm Muslims by virtue of their faith. In rejecting the transgender service ban, the Court determined that Trump’s sudden announcement of the ban via Twitter tended to support that it was motivated by a desire to harm a politically unpopular group (at least among his own base) than any rational policy objective.

Beyond Trump’s inability to keep his mouth shut or his fingers away from his cell phone, his policies have also failed as a result of his Administration’s resistance to established procedures and its shoddy lawyering. For instance, in reference to the transgender service ban, the Court noted that it “by no means suggests that it was not within the President’s authority to order that additional studies be undertaken and that this policy be reevaluated. If the President had done so and then decided that banning all transgender individuals from serving in the military was beneficial to the various military objectives cited, this would be a different case.”

Although it seems unlikely that Trump will suddenly exhibit the discipline required by his office,  the extent to which courts have relied on the Administration’s missteps to overturn discriminatory policies suggests that we cannot simply assume courts will continue to do so, should Trump demonstrate a modicum of self-control. Further studies would be unlikely to support the President’s overblown, discriminatory rhetoric, so a transgender ban (for example) would be unlikely to succeed, all things being fair and equal, even if championed by a more competent administration – but only if people of conscience, including attorneys, continue to fight vigorously for America’s constitutional and statutory guarantees.

Moreover, while the federal courts have been preventing the worst of Trump’s abuses from coming to fruition, the Trump Administration has been working at a breakneck pace to fill the large number of judicial vacancies (more than 150) that remained unfilled at the end of the Obama presidency. Filling these vacancies with opponents of basic civil rights for LGBTQ individuals has been one of the few “successes” of the Trump presidency. Among the 50 or candidates Trump has nominated to lifetime federal judicial appointments include Jeff Mateer, who in 2015 referred to transgender children as proof of “Satan’s plan.” Another, John K. Bush (who has already been confirmed to a seat on the Sixth Circuit), had a previous side career as a right-wing blogger who derided LGBTQ individuals and promoted conspiracy theories about President Obama’s citizenship.

Thus, although the courts have largely risen to the extraordinary challenges posed by Trump’s discriminatory policies, that job will become increasingly difficult as Trump’s own judges come to represent a significant portion of the federal bench. If we expect the courts to keep up, we must remain vigilant and strenuously oppose those of Trump’s judicial appointees who will rubber-stamp the unfit President’s agenda. 

Equal Pay for Equal Work Gets Another Chance at the Ninth Circuit in Rizo v. Yovino

UPDATE (5/21/18): On rehearing, the Ninth Circuit reversed itself, holding "prior salary alone or in combination with other factors cannot justify a wage differential." Read more about this historic decision here. Readers interested in learning more about this topic may wish to review this research paper, explaining the important positive effects of prohibiting employers from relying on past salary history to set workers' wages. 

Can employers rely solely on employees’ prior salaries to justify unequal pay for equal work?

This is the essentially the question the Ninth Circuit addressed earlier this year in Rizo v. Yovino. In the Rizo case, a female math consultant hired by the Fresno County Schools, Aileen Rizo, was underpaid thousands of dollars compared to her male peers solely because Ms. Rizo’s prior salary was comparatively lower than that of her male peers despite her male peers having less experience. To the dismay of advocates for pay equity nationwide, the Ninth Circuit held that the federal Equal Pay Act of 1963 (29 U.S.C. § 206(d)) does not prohibit an employer from relying solely on employees’ past salary histories to set compensation.[1] 854 F.3d 1161, 1167 (9th Cir. 2017).

The primary flaw in the Ninth Circuit’s opinion stemmed from an overbroad interpretation of its precedent, Kouba v. Allstate Insurance Company. 691 F.2d 873, 876 (9th Cir. 1982). In Kouba, the employer paid its employees a minimum guaranteed salary plus commissions based on employees’ sales. Id. at 874. In setting new employees’ minimum salaries, the employer considered “ability, education, experience, and prior salary.” Id. In this context, where the employer did not rely exclusively on prior salary history in setting employee compensation, the Court previously held that “the Equal Pay Act does not impose a strict prohibition against the use of prior salary.” Id. 878. The Court emphasized that an employer who uses prior salary to set compensation “must” provide “business reasons” that “reasonably explain its use of that factor,” and provided the trial court with a non-exhaustive list of fact-specific questions to consider in evaluating the “reasonableness of this practice.” Id. (emph. added).

Unlike in Kouba, the County in Yovino set new employees’ compensation by increasing their most recent prior salaries by 5% without taking into account employees’ experience or skill. Yovino, 854 F.3d at 1164. Applicants with a master’s degree were given a flat $1,200 bump. Id. Because of the well-established fact that women in nearly every occupation are paid less than men even when controlling for a host of possibly explanatory variables[2], the County’s exclusive use of employees’ prior salary perpetuated the gender wage gap in contravention of the purpose of the Equal Pay Act. The Tenth and Eleventh Circuits have come to this same conclusion. See, e.g., Riser v. QEP Energy, 776 F.3d 1191, 1199 (10th Cir. 2015) (“the EPA precludes an employer from relying solely upon a prior salary to justify pay disparity”); Irby v. Bittick, 44 F.3d 949, 955 (11th Cir. 1995) (“prior salary alone cannot justify pay disparity”).

The Ninth Circuit, diverging from two of its sister circuits, failed to give sufficient weight to the context in which Kouba was decided, particularly with respect to the fact that the Kouba employer used sex-neutral factors in addition to prior salary history. Instead, the Court read Kouba as permitting a “salary differential based solely on prior earnings” without “attribut[ing] any significance to [the Kouba employer’s] use of these other factors [i.e., ability, education, and experience].” Yovino, 854 F.3d at 1166.

Fortunately, this is not the end of the story. Last week, the Ninth Circuit granted Ms. Rizo’s request for a rehearing en banc, meaning that all eligible judges serving on the Ninth Circuit will rehear the case.

Fifty four years have passed since the Equal Pay Act was signed into law to end the “serious and endemic problem of employment discrimination in private industry—the fact that the wage structure of ‘many segments of American industry has been based on an ancient but outmoded belief that a man, because of his role in society, should be paid more than a woman even though his duties are the same.’” Corning Glass Works v. Brennan, 417 U.S. 188, 195 (1974). Now, the Ninth Circuit has an opportunity to reconsider its erroneous interpretation of the Equal Pay Act and, in the process, move our country closer to achieving the goal of equal pay for equal work.

[1] California’s state law analog, the Fair Pay Act, expressly prohibits the exclusive use of “[p]rior salary” to “justify any disparity in compensation” with respect to sex, ethnicity, and race. Cal. Lab. Code §§ 1197.5(a)(3), (b)(3).

[2] See Brief for Equal Rights Advocates et al. as Amici Curiae in Support of Plaintiff-Appellee’s Petition for Rehearing and Rehearing En Banc, pp. 12-15, Rizo v. Yovino (9th Cir. 2017) (No. 16-15372), available at https://nwlc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/5.22.17_Final_Rizo-v.-Yovino_Motion-and-Amicus-Brief-ISO-Petition-for-Reharing-and-Rehearing-En-Banc.pdf

Seventh Circuit Holds Federal Law Prohibits Employers From Firing People Because they are Gay

Before the full panel, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit issued a groundbreaking decision, holding 8-3 that workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation violates federal civil rights law.

The case involved a lesbian, Kimberley Hively, who sued Ivy Tech Community College when it denied her full-time employment and promotions because she was a lesbian and married to a woman. Hively began teaching at Ivy Tech in 2000 as a part-time adjunct professor. Between 2009 and 2014, Hively applied for at least six full-time positions, but each of these efforts were unsuccessful; even worse, in July 2014 her part-time contract with Ivy Tech was not renewed, resulting in her termination.

After she was terminated, Hively filed an administrative complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging that Ivy Tech discriminated against her because of her sexual orientation and violated her rights under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. After the trial court dismissed the case, the Seventh Circuit initially affirmed the the trial court's decision based on decades of case law that held sexual orientation was not a protected category under Title VII. Hively v. Ivy Tech Cmty. Coll., 830 F.3d 698 (7th Cir. 2016). 

Before the Seventh Circuit's full panel, Chief Judge Diane Wood, writing for the majority, brought new life into analyzing claims of sexual orientation discrimination under Title VII. The court framed the main question of the case as a question of statutory interpretation: what does it mean to discriminate on the basis of sex, and in particular, are actions taken on the basis of sexual orientation  a subset of actions taken on the basis of sex?

Guided by the U.S. Supreme Court's approach in a related case addressing whether Title VII covered sexual harassment inflicted by a man on a male victim (Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Servs., Inc., 523 U.S. 75 (1998)), the Seventh Circuit acknowledged that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation may not have been the principal evil Congress was concerned with when it passed Title VII. The Seventh Circuit nonetheless found that "statutory prohibitions often go beyond the principal evil to cover reasonably comparable evils, and it is ultimately the provisions of our laws rather than the principal concerns of our legislators by which [courts] are governed." Id. at 79-80. The court also acknowledged that Title VII has been understood to cover far more than the simple decision of an employer not to hire a woman simply because of her gender.

Hively framed her argument for why she should be covered by Title VII under two approaches: (1) a simple comparison isolating Hively's sex and the significance it played in her employer's decision; and (2) relying on Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), which found that the Fourteenth Amendment of the constitution protects interracial marriages, holding that Title VII protects Hively's right to associate intimately with a person of the same sex. 

Under the first approach, the court found that if Hively had been a man married to a woman, and everything else would have stayed the same, Ivy Tech would not have refused to promote her and would not have fired her. The court stated that "any discomfort, disapproval, or job decision based on the fact that the complainant - man or woman - dresses differently, speaks differently, or dates and marries a same-sex partner, is a reaction purely and simply based on sex," falling within Title VII's prohibition against sex discrimination. 

Addressing the second theory of discrimination presented by Hively, the court, relying on decades of cases holding that Title VII prohibits discrimination based on the race with whom a person associates, found that Ivy Tech's discrimination against Hively based on the sex of the person she associated with is also prohibited under the act. 

The court concluded with a clear holding: a person alleging that he or she experienced employment discrimination on the basis of his or her sexual orientation has put forth a case of sex discrimination for Title VII purposes. 

This is a landmark decision for the LGBTQ community, extending federal employment protections in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana, which previously had state laws that only prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation with regards to state employment. This decision will now cover all private and public employers subject to Title VII. And, this will hopefully lead to other U.S. Circuit Courts revisiting this issue and expanding employment protections across the country for the LGBTQ community.

In California, the state's Fair Employment and Housing Act and Unruh Civil Rights Act have explicitly protected sexual orientation and gender identity from discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations for many years. Last year, California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing became the first state civil rights agency to issue guidance to employers regarding transgender employees.

If you have experienced discrimination based upon your sexual orientation, and need help, contact Bryan Schwartz Law.

U.S. Supreme Court Upholds University of Texas’s Race-Conscious Admissions Program

In a 4-3 decision Thursday, the Supreme Court affirmed that a race-conscious admissions program used by the University of Texas is legal under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment—at least, as that program was implemented in 2008 when UT rejected Abigail Fisher’s college application. Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas (Fisher II) was far from an enthusiastic defense of the need for race-conscious admissions programs at public universities, but it affirmed the status quo in reiterating the narrow range of circumstances in which such programs are constitutionally permissible. For that reason, advocates for racial justice can mark Fisher in the win column.

Fisher first came before the Court during the October 2012 term (Fisher I), at which point Ms. Fisher had already graduated from Louisiana State University with a degree in finance. The Court set forth the principles the UT admissions program needed to satisfy under the 14th Amendment (discussed below), said that the Fifth Circuit had failed to apply those principles, and sent the case back for the Fifth Circuit to reconsider.

The Supreme Court first addressed the constitutionality of affirmative action in higher education when it struck down a quota system for applications to the University of California Medical School at Davis in 1978. However, that case, Regents of University of California v. Bakke, also established that affirmative action would be constitutionally permissible, at least in some circumstances. The Court did not clearly establish the applicable level of scrutiny until the mid-1990s, when the Rehnquist Court held that all racial classifications—without regard to whether those classifications were intended to hinder or help people of color—would be subject to the highest level of scrutiny (strict scrutiny) under the Equal Protection Clause. In dissent, Justice Stevens wryly chided the majority as unable to tell “the difference between a ‘No Trespassing’ sign and a welcome mat.”

More recently, the Court considered two race-based admissions programs at the University of Michigan in 2003. The Court (in two opinions by Justice O’Connor) struck down the undergraduate school’s use of a point system to boost applications from people of color while it upheld the Law School’s use of race as a “plus factor” as part of a flexible assessment of other “soft variables.” Those decisions also established “attaining a diverse student body”—for the benefit of all students—as the only permissible basis for an affirmative action program. An affirmative action program that sought to remedy the effects of past discrimination, for example, would not pass constitutional muster. These Michigan cases established the needle which UT needed to thread if it wanted to promote diversity at its flagship university while satisfying strict scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause.

UT thus developed an intriguing strategy to diversify its student body, by taking advantage of widespread racial segregation in the state’s public schools: it would offer admission to all students who placed in the top 10% of their high school class, up to 75% of the class. UT would then admit the remaining 25% according to an individualized inquiry which would consider race as one factor among many, much like the Michigan Law School plan approved by the Court. In alleging that her rejection from UT was racially discriminatory, Ms. Fisher challenged only the latter aspect of the admissions program (as she did not place in the top 10% of her high school class).

In Fisher I, Justice Kennedy described three controlling principles to assess the constitutionality of a public university’s race-conscious admissions program. First, such a program would have to satisfy strict scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause (that is, it must be narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling government interest, and diversity qualifies as such an interest). Second, courts should defer to a university’s academic judgment, accompanied by reasoned explanation, that a diverse student body would promote its educational goals. Third, the university bears the burden of proving that a race-neutral approach would not accomplish the same goals.

In Fisher II, Justice Kennedy determined that UT had met its burden with respect to all three principles. In large part, Kennedy appears to have been persuaded by the comprehensiveness of the data produced by UT in support of its need to go beyond the Top 10% program to achieve the educational benefits of a diverse student body, the modesty of the program (using race as “but a ‘factor of a factor of a factor’ in the holistic-review calculus”), and a desire to defer to UT’s academic judgment.

Justice Kennedy’s Fisher II opinion (much like his Fisher I opinion) is far from a model of clarity. Justice Kennedy went to great lengths to explain that UT’s admissions program was one-of-a-kind, that the Court’s ruling was meant only to capture a moment in time, and that the opinion had “limit[ed] value for prospective guidance.” Justice Kennedy referred to UT’s program as unique (he used the Latin), although it is unclear why he thinks other states will not adopt a similar approach now that the Court has given its seal of approval—Texas is not unique in its de facto racially segregated public schools. He also noted that the opinion did not intend to approve of UT’s admissions program today or in the future, explaining that UT should continually assess the need for a race-conscious admissions policy.

In doing so, he also fell prey to the same dubious assumption as Justice O’Connor in the Michigan cases: that racism in the United States will soon become a distant memory (Justice O’Connor stated that affirmative action would cease to be necessary by 2028). This premise was misleading, even before a major U.S. political party nominated an overtly racist demagogue as its standard bearer.

Still, Justice Kennedy should be commended for his evolution on affirmative action. He voted to strike down the use of race as a plus factor in the Michigan Law School case less than 15 years ago, and less than 10 years ago joined the majority in striking down Seattle’s use of race in school assignments to further Seattle’s goal of racially integrated public schools. In fact, Justice Kennedy has never before affirmed an affirmative action program. Particularly before the death of Justice Scalia, many commentators suspected that Fisher II would effectively end race-conscious admissions at public universities, and deny countless students of color a fair shake in the application process. Fisher II instead preserved the status quo, for which the four justices in the majority should be applauded.