House Democrats next week will pass legislation that would force companies to report wage data to the government, so officials can see whether men and women are being paid equally for the same work.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., told lawmakers he’ll call up a vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act, a measure Democrats have been trying to pass for more than 20 years.
The bill is sponsored by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., who first introduced it in 1997.
Under the bill, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would issue new regulations requiring employers to provide the government “compensation data and other employment-related data (including hiring, termination, and promotion data) disaggregated by the sex, race, and national origin of employees.”
Former President Barack Obama instituted such a reporting requirement through executive action, but President Trump ended the practice at the behest of business groups who say the data are a faulty tool to measure income inequality. The Democratic proposal would make the the reporting requirement law, so that future presidents would have no power to lift it.
The bill aims to ensure women receive the same pay as men for equal work by making it easier to sue employers and by expanding the damages that can be awarded to plaintiffs in successful court cases.
The bill, which would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, would also prevent employers from retaliating against workers who discuss salaries with other workers.
Democrats say the bill is needed because of data showing that women on average earn 80 cents for every dollar a man earns, and that the gap is even wider for minority women.
“Women and men in the same job should have the same pay, and the Paycheck Fairness Act is a strong step forward in ensuring that we close the wage gap once and for all,” DeLauro, who chairs the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations subcommittee, said when she reintroduced it. “This legislation addresses the issue in a comprehensive and sensible manner, and it is long overdue.”
But conservative critics have challenged the data, and say the gap is much more narrow and mostly caused by factors other than gender, such as occupation choice, education level, and work hours, such as choosing to work a night shift.
“Ninety precent of what employers look at when they are determining pay are not factored into that gap,” Rachel Greszler, research fellow in economics, budget, and entitlements at the conservative Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner.
Business groups, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, oppose the Paycheck Fairness Act. They argue the law would take away their authority to decide compensation levels and hand them over to the government, while leaving them open to more litigation, class action lawsuits, and expanded damages that could cripple them.
Greszler said the measure would hinder employers from deciding the value of employees based on what they contribute and could promote a rigid pay scale that would disincentivize productivity.
Ultimately, she warned, it could hurt women and minorities in the workforce.
“Employers are going to look at women and different races in the hiring process and start to discriminate against them before they get their foot in the door,” Greszler said. “Because they are a higher liability coming in.”
But the bill’s supporters will win the day in the Democratic-led House, even if the legislation goes nowhere in the Senate. Groups like the progressive Center for American Progress support the idea as a way to help minority women, a group that many progressive women in Congress have made a high priority.
“The failure to effectively combat pay discrimination puts women and the families they support at an economic disadvantage, and what may seem like pennies an hour translates into hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime, and hundreds of billions of dollars to our economy as a whole,” said Jocelyn Frye, a senior fellow at the center. “Women of color, who experience the sharpest pay disparities, are particularly hard-hit.”
