US to collect equal pay data from all big employers

Chief among the actions announced Friday is a new proposal that will demand businesses of 100 or more employees to publish annual summaries of pay data sorted by gender, race, and ethnicity. “What kind of example does paying women less set for our sons and daughters?”

The rules will require companies to report to the federal government what they pay employees, broken down by the employees’ race, gender, and ethnicity, according to the New York Times. It expands on and replaces an earlier plan by the Department of Labor to collect similar information from federal contractors.

It’s been seven years since the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first piece of legislation President Obama signed.

White House officials said that the requirement was meant to bolster the government’s ability to penalize companies that engage in discriminatory pay practices and to encourage businesses to police themselves better and correct such disparities.

Today, the median wage for a full-time working woman is about $39,000; the median for a full-time working man is $50, 400. While the bill granted the right to legally challenge an employer, women across the country are still fighting for federal equal pay legislation. For African-American women, it’s just 60 cents, and for Latino women, just 55 cents.

Randy Johnson, senior vice president of labor, immigration and employee benefits at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the Obama administration move was a “fishing expedition to support a political agenda divorced from the facts”.

The revision would add aggregate data on pay ranges and hours worked to the information collected, beginning with the September 2017 report.

In Iowa now women make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes.

The EEOC and the president are also calling on Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, a measure the Republican-controlled Congress has repeatedly blocked.

Ledbetter, after formally endorsing, was at the White House that same day to introduce Obama at the commemoration. The U.S. Supreme Court threw out her case, saying she waited too long to file a complaint. Conservative economists have argued that those differences, not gender alone, explain most of the pay gap.

Obama’s proposal would make it easier for women to know what men in their company make.

To young women entering the workforce, Ledbetter said beware of employers’ attempts to take advantage and sell a lower salary by offering future raises.

The US gender pay gap has narrowed slightly in recent years, but remains significant.