Caring Work, Women's Work, Essential Work: Reconsidering Comparable Worth as an Approach to Pay Equity for Care Workers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrust care work into the national spotlight, highlighting its essential role in our society alongside its low pay, challenging working conditions, and disproportionately female labor force. For the past several years, there has also been increased attention to the pay disparities between men and women workers. New state laws have sought to expand equal pay's reach in innovative ways. Yet as this Article will demonstrate, many of these innovative approaches to pay disparities cannot improve the wages of care workers, whose segregation into a predominantly female workforce is a key cause of both their low pay and the inability of traditional pay equity laws to reach them. This Article argues that an alternative approach to pay equity-comparable worth-may be a more successful way to increase wages of care workers. The Article begins by recounting comparable worth's history as a legal and political strategy in tile late 1970s and early 1980s, with a focus on both its mechanics and significance. This history reveals that while comparable worth offers useful analytical tools for tackling pay disparities in the care economy, the program's standard implementation during this period was problematic in several crucial ways. Alternative implementations--like the approach embraced by the clerical and technical workers at Yale University--may provide a more useful path forward. The second Part of the Article then examines comparable worth's value to contemporary care workers. While comparable worth addresses head-on the occupational segregation and discriminatory market wages that are unreachable under current pay equity law, it operates within a legal regime that remains hostile to comparable worth-based claims to pay equity, relies upon firm-level wage setting in ways that would provide limited relief, and cannot reach unpaid care workers. Accordingly, successfully implementing the principles of equity articulated in comparable worth for care workers will also depend upon expanded access to labor union representation, increased state support for this essential labor, and an embrace of wage setting's essentially political nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]