N.M. fails to produce data on equal pay

Annual reports ordered by former Gov. Richardson haven’t been completed in Martinez’s administration

Are women in state government getting equal pay for equal work?

Then-Gov. Bill Richardson issued an executive order late in his second term tasking the state’s civil service system with answering that question.

But more than eight years after Richardson, a Democrat, directed the State Personnel Office to produce annual reports on pay equity in New Mexico government, the agency has not published any such analysis under Republican Gov. Susana Martinez.

“Taxpayers are entitled to know how their money is being spent and whether their money is being spent fairly,” said Martha Burk, who chaired Richardson’s Task Force on Fair and Equal Pay.

The reports, she said, “have been completely ignored by the Martinez administration.”

Richardson’s executive order came after that task force found gaps between what some women and men were paid for doing effectively the same job.

That report found wage disparities between men and women in state government were below the national average. At the time, women were paid on average 77 cents for every dollar paid to a man for the same work.

Still, the report said, wage gaps that might seem small can amount to hundreds or thousands of dollars a year for a worker. As an example, the report said a 10 percent disparity for employees in one pay band at the Department of Transportation would amount to a loss of $7,155 in some workers’ paychecks each year.

Richardson ordered the State Personnel Office to submit annual Fair and Equal Pay Reports to the Governor’s Office by Oct. 1 each year.

The reports were to include pay information about each agency under the governor’s control and highlight disparities between men and women.

Richardson left office at the end of 2010. And though his order still stands, it appears Martinez’s administration never produced those reports.

During the agency’s most recent financial review, auditors flagged the State Personnel Office’s failure to file a report on pay equity.

The bottom line, auditors wrote: The office is not in compliance with the executive order. A lawyer for the agency told

The New Mexican in an email: “The State Personnel [Office] will comply with the executive order and submit its report by October 1, 2018.”

It was unclear if the agency had merely missed one year’s report, so The New Mexican asked the State Personnel Office turn over reports from previous years.

The agency said it did not have any such documents.

Martinez has highlighted her record on pay equity.

For example, she signed the Fair Pay for Women Act, which gives women new options to challenge unfair practices in the workplace.

But some state employees — including a deputy prison warden and lawyer for the Corrections Department — have filed suit against the New Mexico government under the law, arguing they are unfairly paid less than their male colleagues. In response, the Martinez administration has said the law applies to the private sector but not to state government.

The Governor’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, another facet of those nearly decadeold pay equity efforts appears to have fallen apart.

Richardson’s executive order also requires vendors who do business with state agencies to submit a pay equity report when bidding for contracts.

Then-State Auditor Tim Keller reviewed those records last year and found a persistent wage gap, with women in managerial positions for state contractors earning an average of 74 cents for every dollar paid to men doing the same jobs.

The review found, too, that women are underrepresented among what are known as craft workers — manual workers with relatively high levels of skill. Among the government contractors that filed reports, only 3 percent of workers in that category were women.

But the review also revealed what Keller’s office called “drastic under-reporting,” with vendors only submitting 267 reports over six years — a small number for all the contracts state agencies put out to bid.