npr:

When Courtney Hering started working at Kohler Co. seven years ago, she was continuing a long family tradition.

“My mother, she’s been here 39 years,” she says. “My dad worked here for 14 years. And my grandfather on my dad’s side, he worked here as well.”

Best known for its bathtubs and kitchen fixtures, Kohler has been turning out solid products and solid jobs near the Sheboygan River in Wisconsin for nearly 150 years. Hering joined the company after a stint in the Marine Corps in North Carolina. She got a job in Kohler’s distribution center, moving finished faucets and unfinished brass. Her starting pay was about $11.50 an hour.

It was only after she’d been working there for a couple of years that Hering realized something startling: Many of her colleagues doing exactly the same work were paid nearly twice as much as she was. “It made me realize, ‘Oh man, this is a huge gap,’ ” Hering says.

That gap was a hangover from the Great Recession, when workers lost negotiating power and companies found a way to reduce wages. It’s also one of the pieces of the puzzle that help explain why wages stagnated for years, even as the economy came roaring back.

In 2010, Kohler adopted a two-tiered wage scale, and workers like Hering, who were hired after that, were stuck for years on a much lower track for both pay and benefits.

A lot of companies made similar moves during the recession — most notably the big U.S. automakers. With the economy in free-fall, workers didn’t have much power to resist.

2-Tiered Wages Under Fire: Workers Challenge Unequal Pay For Equal Work

Photos: Sara Stathas for NPR