Colorado’s Equal Pay for Equal Work Act creates no new legal protections for women in the workforce. Nonetheless, it has proven wildly successful in ensuring equal pay, regardless of sex, of $0.00 per hour for Colorado job seekers.

Also read: COUNTERPOINT | ‘Bad businesses need not hire here’

Advocates tout the law, SB 19-085, as a protection against gender-based wage discrimination, yet existing federal and state laws already prohibited discriminatory hiring and compensation based on sex.

The federal Equal Pay Act of 1963 “prohibit[s] discrimination on account of sex in the payment of wages by employers.” Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “also makes it illegal to discriminate based on sex in pay and benefits,” according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Prior to SB 19-085, Title 8 of the Colorado Revised Statutes stated, “No employer shall make any discrimination in the amount or rate of wages or salary paid or to be paid his employees in any employment in this state solely on account of the sex thereof.” The new law struck and replaced this language.

With existing legal protections going back nearly six decades, why did the Colorado General Assembly pass such a law?

The bill explains: “Despite policies outlawing pay discrimination and creating avenues for women to bring a civil action for lost wages, women still earn significantly less than their male counterparts for the same work.”

The bill then cites thoroughly debunked evidence of a persistent gender pay gap and concludes that the general assembly must “pass legislation that helps to close the pay gap in Colorado.” In other words, it’s not enough to outlaw discrimination; the government must proactively intervene to ensure men and women get paid the same.

In their attempt to address a phantom problem, however, the legislature has done nothing to improve women’s lives. They only created new problems for workers and businesses alike.

Karlyn Borysenko said it best in a column for Forbes last year: “The gender pay gap doesn’t exist.” 

But rather than going through the mountain of evidence – including an Obama-era U.S. Department of Labor study, which concludes that the wage gap “may be almost entirely the result of individual choices being made by both male and female workers” – proving SB 19-085 attempts to address a nonexistent injustice, let’s look at what the bill actually does.

The law creates new regulations with which companies must comply if they employ a single Colorado resident or advertise jobs to Coloradans. These include mandates for employers “to disclose in each posting for each job opening the hourly or salary compensation” and to keep records of wage rate history for all employees “in order to determine if there is a pattern of wage discrepancy.”

The bill also places subjective compliance burdens on employers and requires them to prove their innocence of discrimination charges.

If companies fail to comply, the law subjects them to endless litigation and fines ranging from $500 to $10,000 per violation.

In response, many employers are avoiding hiring Coloradans altogether.

As companies make more remote job opportunities available in the post-pandemic economy, many postings now include caveats such as this one from Johnson & Johnson: “Work location is flexible if approved by the Company except that position may not be performed remotely from Colorado.”

In a 2019 Op-Ed published before the bill passed, Joni Inman, executive director of the Colorado Women’s Alliance, prophetically observed, “This bill hurts women. It eliminates opportunity rather than promoting it.”

Rather than helping women in the workforce, the law is disqualifying them from certain jobs entirely and creating a new equal pay of $0.00 per hour for the Colorado workers – men and women – who are missing out on good jobs.

Ben Murrey serves as Independence Institute’s Director of the Fiscal Policy Center and spent seven years as a U.S. Senate aide.