The Obama administration just finalized rules for a massive data collection project that targets American businesses, with the intent of going after companies the government believes are discriminating against women and minorities.
In its latest move, Big Brother finalized the federal government’s new EEO-1 form, which was created via a presidential memorandum in 2014 (i.e., this wasn’t a congressionally-approved move). Starting in March 2018, the mandatory form will enable the government to collect certain employment data from businesses with 100 or more employees, spanning about 60,000 employers and 63 million workers.
The government will then use this data to go after business that they believe may be discriminating against women, particularly those from minority groups. According to the White House press release that accompanied the move:
Today’s action will promote improved voluntary compliance by employers with existing equal pay laws. It will 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.
But there’s a major logical fly in the president’s self-righteous ointment. By his own admission, this massive data collection is predicated on the false notion that there’s a "wage gap" between men and women. From the president's desk:
In 2008, a typical woman working full-time earned only 77 cents for every dollar earned by a typical man; today, that has risen to 80 cents. That means that for a woman working full-time, the pay gap has shrunk by more than 10 percent, or about $1200, since the President took office.
Yet much work remains. Too many women and workers of color are still not paid equally for equal work, with African-American women earning 63 cents and Latina women earning 54 cents for every dollar earned by a white non-Hispanic man.
To fix this oft-cited and completely debunked “wage gap” that makes up a cornerstone of anti-capitalist liberal doctrine (see here, here and here for starters), President Obama decided the answer could be found in amassing large caches of data on private companies’ employment practices. The collection will include pay data broken down by gender, race and ethnicity to see if there are discrepancies in salary across these groups. Hello, Orwell.
The equal Employment Opportunity Commission also released a statement on the new form, explaining:
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) today announced that starting March 2018, it will collect summary employee pay data from certain employers. The new data will improve investigations of possible pay discrimination, which remains a contributing factor to persistent wage gaps.
But the form doesn’t include other relevant employee-specific information, such as education, experience level, hours worked, company history, skills or job performance – all factors that regularly impact an employee’s salary and can easily help explain so-called “gaps.” Without factoring in these and other variables in relation to each particular employee, it’s virtually impossible to accurately depict any disparity between different segments of the workforce, be it gender, race, hair color, you name it.
So given that this “data” harvesting is unlikely to help government officials get a good grasp on “wage gaps” between various gender/racial employee segments, this federal charade is easily exposed for exactly what it is: yet another unrestricted, invasive government attempt at controlling the private sector via intimidation and arbitrary threats, passed off to gullible propaganda consumers as a heroic “fix” to a non-existent problem.