Donald Trump has delighted in tearing down every one of President Barack Obama’s executive orders. One day, he signed off on 17 reversals. This time, 45 went too far.
Apparently, it was not enough for Trump to face three lawsuits in one day from women he allegedly sexually molested, slandered, or silenced with threats. He had to kill a 2016 Obama rule that was supposed to force businesses to sort their payment histories by race and gender.
The current White House administration insisted they wanted to end the rule last August. Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Neomi Rao, told The Wall Street Journal that the rule was “enormously burdensome:”
‘We don’t believe it would actually help us gather information about wage and employment discrimination.’
Obama’s earth-shaking requirement would have collected data for the purpose of advancing equalities in pay for women and minorities in the work setting.
Now, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) have both filed their lawsuits against the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in Washington, D.C.’s U.S. District Court. The 15-page lawsuit alleged that the OMB violated the Freedom of Information Act.
According to the NWLC press release, the director of the Economic Justice Project for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Dariely Rodriguez, said at the time:
‘The administration’s move to suspend the collection of pay data from employers threatens to turn the clock back on efforts to identify and eliminate pay discrimination through increased transparency and reporting. Those most affected by pay discrimination, including African-American men and women, deserve to know why the administration chose to side with corporations, without any input from the public. With the complaint filed today, we are seeking the answers the Trump administration should have already provided to the public.’
The OMB did not respond to five separate requests that these two civil rights groups sent for records regarding the Trump Administration shutting down President Obama’s pay data collection rule. Obama’s rule was intended to require companies with at least 100 employees to report their pay data.
The ruling included both federal contractors and subcontractors working for companies, and it would have begun in March 2018. The companies would have entered the equality data onto the annual Employer Information Report or the EEO-1 form.
After five tries, the Lawyer’s Committee and NWLC requested a judge to mandate OMB hand over all documents involving its “sudden and largely unexplained decision.” The civil rights groups wrote:
‘A dearth of comparative salary and wage information may contribute to the persistence of race and gender pay gaps, and limit attempts to remedy them. As a result, employees face significant obstacles in gathering the information that would indicate they have experienced pay discrimination, which undermines their ability to challenge such discrimination.’
The two organizations’ last data indicated that women only receive 80 cents for each dollar companies pay their white, non-Hispanic male employees for identical or comparable full-time, year-round work. For women of color, the two groups said the situation is far more dire. A black woman makes just 63 cents for every dollar the men earn. Native American women earn just 57 cents, and Latinas earn a mere 54 cents paid to their white male counterparts,
Men of color make far less than white non-Hispanic men. Black men earn 72 cents on the dollar, and Latino men earn only 62 cents on the dollar.
To read the entire 15-page lawsuit, click on this link.
Featured Image via Getty Images/Spencer Platt.
