Acme Salary Inequality

566 Words3 Pages
Joe Black was trying to figure out what to do about a problem salary situation he had in his plant. Black recently took over as president of Acme Manufacturing. The founder, Bill George, had been presidgwt for 35 years. The company, was family owned and located in a small eastem Arkansas town. It had approximately 250 employees and was the largest employer in the community. Black was a member of the family that owned Acme, but he had never worked for the company prior to becoming president. He had an MBA and a law degree, plus 15 years of management experience with a large manufacturing organization, where he was senior vice president for human resources when he made his move to Acme. A short time after joining Acme, Black started to notice that there was considerable inequity in the pay structure for salaried employees. A discussion with the human resources director led h im to believe that salaried employees' pay was very much a matter of individual bargaining w i t h the past president. Hourly paid factory employees were not part of the problem because they were unionized and their wages were set by collective bargaining. An examination.of the salaried payroll showed that there were 25 employees, ranging in pay from that of the president to that of the receptionist. A closer examination showed that 14 of the salaried employees were female. Three of these were front-line factory supervisors and one was the personnel director. The other 10 were nonmanagement. This examination also showed that the human resources director appeared to be underpaid, and that the three female supervisors were paid somewhat less than any of the male supervisors. However, there were no similar supervisory jobs i n which there were both male and female job incumbents. When asked, the HR director said she thought the female supervisors may have been
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