> In a disparate-impact claim, a plaintiff may establish liability, without proof of intentional discrimination, if an identified business practice has a disproportionate effect on certain groups of individuals and if the practice is not grounded in sound business considerations.
> The Court emphasized the plaintiff’s burden to establish a “robust” causal connection between the challenged practice and the alleged disparities. Further, a defendant’s justification is “not contrary to the disparate-impact requirement, unless … artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary.”
Paying more for people physical located in Palo Alto can be justified by a “sound business consideration.” The company isn’t discriminating based on location, per se. It is simply bidding in a labor market. It just so happens that those bids need to be higher to recruit workers for a physical office in San Francisco than elsewhere.
With remote work, that “sound business consideration” disappears. You no longer care whether the person is physical located in San Francisco. So why should the company pay more for such workers? Justifying the policy as “necessary” and “not artificial” becomes more complicated than with in-person work.
Because companies cannot force people to live in cheap COL places so they can pay them less? If the best person for the job lives in SF then the best person for the job lives in SF.
Where is this assumption that equalizing pay across regions is a race to the top, and not to the bottom, coming from anyways?
But the new Facebook policy isn’t merit based (“best person for the job”). If the “best person for the job” happens to want to live in Atlanta, she will get paid less than the marginal candidate who happens to live in San Francisco.
You seem to be overlooking why geographic discrimination in salaries exists in the first place. As tzs points out in a sibling comment, it’s because when Google has an office in Mountain View, it doesn’t just care about hiring the Nth-percentile employee. It has to pay enough to hire the Nth-percentile employee who wants to live in Mountain View for that salary. Where the worker is located matters because Google has decided that it’s office should be in Mountain View, and further that it wants to have its teams under one roof. That economic justification doesn’t exist for remote workers.
> In a disparate-impact claim, a plaintiff may establish liability, without proof of intentional discrimination, if an identified business practice has a disproportionate effect on certain groups of individuals and if the practice is not grounded in sound business considerations.
> The Court emphasized the plaintiff’s burden to establish a “robust” causal connection between the challenged practice and the alleged disparities. Further, a defendant’s justification is “not contrary to the disparate-impact requirement, unless … artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary.”
Paying more for people physical located in Palo Alto can be justified by a “sound business consideration.” The company isn’t discriminating based on location, per se. It is simply bidding in a labor market. It just so happens that those bids need to be higher to recruit workers for a physical office in San Francisco than elsewhere.
With remote work, that “sound business consideration” disappears. You no longer care whether the person is physical located in San Francisco. So why should the company pay more for such workers? Justifying the policy as “necessary” and “not artificial” becomes more complicated than with in-person work.