The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said Wednesday that it plans to shelve a rule adopted by President Barack Obama's administration to collect pay data in what Democratic lawmakers and advocates said was a setback to efforts to achieve equal pay for women and members of minority groups.
The decision -- yet another twist in a yearslong fight to get employers to share more data about how they pay their employees -- marks another win for the business community and the deregulation agenda of President Donald Trump's administration.
The commission is tasked with enforcing federal anti-discrimination laws related to job applicants and employees.
In the notice, the commission said the cost to employers of collecting the confidential data was much higher than originally estimated and had "unproven utility."
Under the rule, the commission asked all employers with more than 100 employees to supply additional data, breaking down worker pay by race and sex across 10 broad job categories.
But the commission wrote in its notice that under the Paperwork Reduction Act, it is required to balance the usefulness of the data collection with the burden on employers. "At this point in time, the unproven utility to its enforcement program of the pay data ... is far outweighed by the burden imposed on employers," the commission said.
Democratic lawmakers are expected to question commission Chairman Janet Dhillon about the decision when she appears before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Education and Labor next week.
Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., who chairs the committee, said in a statement that "this decision to eliminate the reporting of pay data is a step backwards in the fight for equal pay for equal work."
"As required by federal law, any such collection must be done in a way that balances the burden on employers with the utility of the information to the EEOC's mission," commission spokeswoman Kimberly Smith-Brown said.
Employers will still have to submit their pay data for 2017 and 2018 by a Sept. 30 deadline in response to a court order.
The Office of Management and Budget had frozen the data collection in August 2017.
But equal-pay advocates expressed concern that the commission would do little with the data that is being collected this year, as well as about the signal the commission's decision could send to employers about its commitment to exposing unequal pay.
"I think it sends a message that we don't take this seriously," said Jocelyn Frye, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who was director of policy and special projects for Michelle Obama during the Obama administration.
Marc Freedman, vice president for workplace policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which opposed the new rule, said "there's no reason to think EEOC is less serious about pursuing pay discrimination merely because they're now abandoning a form that wasn't going to help them in the first place. When you look at the data that was going to be submitted, the job categories and pay bands were not reflective of actual positions."
Supporters of the pay-data collection say such concerns obscure the intent of the rule. "This data is not meant to provide definitive proof that pay discrimination is happening; it's meant to be a system that provides some red flags," said Emily Martin, a vice president at the National Women's Law Center. Employers would be compared to their peers, and if differences in race and gender wage gaps are found, "that's a signal that maybe it's time to look a little more closely."
Information for this article was contributed by Renae Merle of The Washington Post.
Business on 09/14/2019