The Trump administration nixed a burdensome Obama-era policy this week that would have mandated businesses collect and turn over data on their employee pay scales in a targeted effort toward eliminating the so-called “gender wage gap.”
The initiative, first announced by the Obama administration last September, would have applied to businesses with 100 or more employees, as well as federal agencies with more than 50 workers. Companies would have been required to collect information on their pay scales by gender and ethnicity, creating large tangles of unnecessary red tape aimed at eliminating a discriminatory gender pay gap that, well, doesn’t actually exist.
At the time, the new regulations were estimated to impact about 60,000 employers and 63 million workers, requiring hours of manpower and God only knows how many dollars.
The Obama White House released a statement at the time saying the new data collection would “also help EEOC and the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) better focus investigations on employers who are illegally shortchanging workers’ pay based on their gender, race, or ethnicity.”
Except that it wouldn't.
"It's enormously burdensome," Neomi Rao, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, told the Wall Street Journal. "We don't believe it would actually help us gather information about wage and employment discrimination."
And Rao’s right. While Obama’s new Eye-In-The-Sky program would have collected some data on gender or ethnic pay differences, it would have admittedly ignored a slew of other factors that impact an employee’s salary, including education, experience, performance and relevant skill set. The result would have been hours of wasted effort and likely millions in incurred costs, only for businesses to be falsely accused of discrimination based on a faulty set of data.
In fact, the only thing this new excessive mandate could have improved would have been the government’s power to infringe on the hiring practices of private companies.
Consider this particular swamp puddle drained.