On January 29 — not coincidentally, the anniversary of President Obama signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009 — the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced it was proposing new regulations. The EEOC wants to amend its mandatory EEO-1 report so that employers with 100 or more employees would have to submit employee W-2 earnings and hours along with a breakdown of salary data by race and gender.
“For the past few years, at the President’s direction, EEOC and OFCCP have sought to develop a reporting tool that would require employers to submit pay data on employees nationwide so the agencies can target investigations to address the gender ‘pay gap,’ ” observes Jackson Lewis, a law firm specializing in employer issues. “This proposal is the culmination of that effort.”
For employers, that sounds more than a little ominous. Warren Meyer, a small-business owner who writes the popular Coyote Blog, spells out what this means in practice:
Not only is the EEOC assuming that this reporting requirement will only take six or seven hours, they’re estimating that it will cost each employer only $160 to comply. This is an affront to the value of employers’ time; it’s also an insulting lie, and the EEOC knows it. “To get to this ‘one-size-fits-all’ six-hour estimate, the EEOC changed the rules it traditionally used to estimate EEO-1 burden, basing its ‘departure’ on increased use of technology,” reports Jackson Lewis. And making matters worse, the EEOC plans to make the aggregated salary data by race and gender publicly available by region and industry, raising significant privacy concerns. That’s even assuming no one hacks into the EEOC and steals the data outright.
That gender discrimination is the impetus for this is particularly frustrating because the best available evidence suggests there is no gender pay gap. Even liberal publications have debunked the oft-repeated line (used by the White House to scare women into the polling booth) that “women make 77 cents to every man’s dollar.” Meanwhile, the actual evidence shows that it’s blue-collar males who are being left behind by Obama’s economy.
The public comment period for this proposal ends on (no fooling) April 1, and The Scrapbook suggests that congressional Republicans get off their duffs and stop this from happening. Once these requirements are implemented, things can only get worse. Just wait until the Sanders administration mandates salary data be broken down according to 51 different genders.
