Equal pay

Kamala Harris, a candidate for president, said she would force companies to pay women the same as men and that is the way it should be but she will enforce the law by having transparency in salaries. Setting aside differences based on legitimate things like education and experience, both should be paid the same but this can cause problems because people are not the same and have not had the same career path. Some managers are more generous than others. If Joe and Jim have both worked with the same company for 20 years doing the same type of work, say research chemist, they may have different salaries because of reasonable things like performance or unreasonable things like personality (likability). Managers are not infallible and sometimes base salary on personality traits. Some of these traits like getting along with fellow workers can be very important and difficult to measure. We have seen this in unions where people working on a production line get the same pay regardless of their work ethic. The government does this based on job level and years of service. An E-5 in the military with 9 years gets the same pay as every other person with the same experience. It is possible that one person can get to be an E-5 faster based on performance or perhaps personality. It is difficult to treat everyone the same when everyone is different.