Background
Jeannette Vivas worked for EZCater, Inc. starting in 2015 as a customer service agent. In 2021 she transferred to the IT department, gaining administrative credentials that gave her access to company databases unavailable to most employees — including a spreadsheet listing employee salaries. On March 2, 2023, she accessed that restricted spreadsheet without authorization and discovered what she believed was a pay disparity between herself and a male colleague. She discussed the issue in a brief instant message with a co-worker and later raised the subject with her interim manager and manager on March 17 and March 20, respectively — but without disclosing that she had accessed the salary database, claiming instead to have learned of the disparity through a “conversation” with a colleague.
On March 24, 2023, a colleague reported to management that Vivas had told him she had “snooped into his salary.” EZCater reviewed login records, confirmed the unauthorized access, confronted Vivas, and terminated her. Vivas filed suit under the Massachusetts Equal Pay Act (MEPA), G. L. c. 149, § 105A, alleging she was fired in retaliation for inquiring about or discussing wages. A Superior Court judge granted summary judgment to EZCater, and the Appeals Court affirmed.
The Court’s Holding
Affirmed. The Appeals Court rejected each of Vivas’s arguments that her conduct was protected under MEPA.
MEPA prohibits employers from retaliating against an employee who has “inquired about or discussed the wages of any other employee.” G. L. c. 149, § 105A (c) (3) (iv). The court held that EZCater did not discharge Vivas for inquiring about wages. Her managers had welcomed her questions about salary equity, took no adverse action after she raised the subject, and assured her she was “going places.” The termination followed disclosure — several days later — that she had violated her administrative privileges by accessing the restricted database and had lied to her managers about how she learned of the disparity. On this undisputed timeline, the causal link between any protected activity and the discharge was absent.
The court further held that nothing in MEPA prohibits employers from protecting their salary databases from unauthorized access, even where the employer has not adopted a written policy specifically authorizing disclosure through “prior written consent.” The court cited G. L. c. 93H (data security), G. L. c. 266, § 120F (prohibiting unauthorized computer access), and 201 Code Mass. Regs. §§ 17.01–17.05 as establishing a framework that allows employers to restrict access to sensitive personnel data. Vivas’s pretext argument also failed: the undisputed sequence of events showed that adverse action arose from the unauthorized access and deception, not from pay inquiries that management had indulged without any negative response.
Key Takeaways
- MEPA’s retaliation provision protects employees who inquire about or discuss wages; it does not protect unauthorized access to a restricted salary database, even if the employee’s underlying motivation was to investigate a pay disparity.
- Where managers affirmatively encouraged wage-equity discussions and took no adverse action until days later when unauthorized database access came to light, a plaintiff cannot establish the causal connection needed for a MEPA retaliation claim.
- Massachusetts employers may protect salary databases from unauthorized access without fear that doing so will expose them to MEPA liability, at least where the employer consistently enforces database-access rules regardless of the employee’s stated reason for the access.
- Pretext is not established by a sequence in which protected activity elicited no negative response and adverse action followed only after an independent, unprotected act came to light.
Why It Matters
Massachusetts’s Equal Pay Act, enacted in 2018, is one of the most plaintiff-friendly pay-equity statutes in the country — it permits employees to compare wages, prohibits most salary-history inquiries, and provides for treble damages and attorney’s fees. Vivas v. EZCater draws a practical boundary: the statute’s retaliation shield covers asking, discussing, and comparing pay through ordinary workplace communication, but it does not shield employees who exceed their authorized system access to obtain salary data.
For employers, the decision provides guidance on how to structure database security without chilling MEPA-protected discussions: maintain clear, consistently enforced access controls, document them, and ensure that managers respond to wage-equity inquiries without retaliating — then discipline unauthorized data access as a separate matter. For employee-side counsel, the takeaway is that a client’s wage-equity grievance must be pursued through legitimate channels (asking, discussing, filing an agency complaint) rather than self-help data access; the latter breaks the causal chain and exposes the client to legitimate discharge for an independent reason.