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City Launches Pay Equity Cabinet To Close Gaps Among Employees

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Mayor de Blasio announced Oct. 21 the establishment of a new pay-equity cabinet that will explore ways to close race- and gender-based wage disparities among city employees starting next month.

The cabinet, which will consist of senior leaders within city government, will evaluate ideas such as having a blind recruitment process across agencies that removes candidates’ gender and race identifiers, and working with unions to lift the wage floor for entry-level and low-paying positions.

Study Starting-Pay Gaps

The reforms also include an independent review of civil-service titles to determine where and why these pay gaps exist, starting with titles where the disparities are $10,000 or more.

“Pay equity is critical to the safety and overall well-being of the most marginalized and vulnerable workers in our city,” the Mayor said. “It can make the difference between having one job or two, or between stable housing or none. This administration has taken bold steps to combat the forces of inequality that hold people back, and this cabinet builds upon the progress we have made to close the pay gap and ensure every New Yorker is treated with the respect they deserve.”


 A few of our stories and columns are now in front of the paywall. We at The Chief-Leader remain committed to independent reporting on labor and civil service. It's been our mission since 1897. You can have a hand in ensuring that our reporting remains relevant in the decades to come. Consider supporting The Chief, which you can do for as little as $2.25 a month.

Veteran public servant Dina Simon was appointed as the cabinet’s executive director. She most recently served as a member of the city’s Taskforce on Racial Equity and Inclusion, which works to ensure that the city’s efforts to recover from the coronavirus pandemic reach low-income and immigrant communities that have been disproportionately affected by the virus.

She said in a statement, “To advance the Cabinet’s important work, I look forward to launching impactful programs and policies in support of women and [black, indigenous and people of color] New Yorkers in the workplace to attract and retain the best and brightest in city government.”

'A Core Value'

Dawn Pinnock, the Executive Deputy Commissioner at the Department of Citywide Administrative Services who will co-chair the pay-equity cabinet, stated that the initiative “will help address the root causes of pay inequity and marshal the city's resources to meet this challenge. Equity is a core value at DCAS and is central to everything we do.”

Wage disparities affecting the city’s workforce came into the spotlight after the City Council released a report on the issue this past August.

The Council found that male civil-servants made $21,600 more than their female counterparts, with much of the disparity caused by “occupational segregation,” with women and people of color disproportionately represented in the titles with the lowest median salaries. It also found that white men were more likely to hold senior titles.

But for some titles, the salary gaps were substantial: the median pay for a male Inspector General was $33,700 higher than for women in the same title, while male Sanitation Workers on average earned $32,700 more than female Sanitation Workers, the report revealed.

The Council must examine the salaries of city workers on an annual basis due to the passage of Local Law 19.

The law, which was passed in 2018, was spurred by a 2013 lawsuit by Communications Workers of America Local 1180 charging that the city had discriminated against the women and people of color who made up a majority of Administrative Managers. The union argued that the title—which has a $53,000 starting salary—was paid the equivalent of $93,000 a year in the 1970s, adjusted for inflation, when it was mostly held by white men.

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