Here is one example. Larger companies must report a few pieces of information regarding their employees to the government, so that the country can measure what has been going on and what might need change. This included workers’ pay by gender and by race. Big business does not want to comply, because time is money. The corporations claimed that this data collection would be too burdensome and would not point to pay discrimination anyway.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has required companies with over 100 employees report each job title by sex and face since recent political memory. Then, in 2016 the agency added pay data. The point was to discover where wage gaps due to discrimination happened, then work to correct the problem.
Reuters reporte that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington D.C. declared that Trump’s cabinet-level Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), as well as acting White House Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, Budget blocked the rule in 2017. He did so without defining the problem the administration had with that rule.
The was the result of a lawsuit filed by the national Women’s Law Center (NWLC) who sued in 2017 in order to bring back that rule. Women and people of color have been discriminated against for hundreds of years. At the time the ruling was installed, the activists’ motivating phrase was “equal pay for equal work.”
Chutkan ordered the OMB to reinstall the requirement.
It was no accident that this White House was quick to discriminate. The largest business lobbyist, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and other trade organizations claimed that this data collection would cost too much, that it would not be fruitful.
Federal law does take into consideration that the OMB could block a regulation for “good cause.” However, the NWLC claimed effectively that the Trump White House did not provide evidence of good cause prior to putting the EEOC data rule on the chopping block. It took six years for the EEOC to create the rule.
Chutkan came down on the side of the NWLC calling the OMB’s action “arbitrary and capricious.” After all, the effort to prepare the statistics only took about a few extra hours each year.
The real issue was that business wanted to save that relatively minor cost of around 50 million dollars. The Chamber claimed the cost would be more like 400 million dollars. The OMB verified that number. Oh yes, and all the money it would take for the business world to bring up the falsely diminished salaries to those of white men.
Featured image is a screenshot via YouTube.
