Equal-pay initiative could be saved

Civil rights groups eager to end freeze

A coalition of more than 90 civil rights groups is preparing to challenge the Trump administration’s decision to halt an Obama-era initiative aimed at fighting employer discrimination against women and minorities.

Emily Martin, general counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, said she and attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union have requested copies of emails, voicemails and other communications among the federal officials who opted in August to freeze a rule that would have required companies to file data broken down by race, ethnicity and gender on what they pay workers.

The rule compelling companies to submit additional information about employees and wages to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was finalized in September 2016 and would have taken effect next year.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, among other industry groups, opposed the measure, arguing that it put an unfair burden on employers.

Since his election, President Donald Trump has frozen or rolled back dozens of regulations that the White House says cost American businesses and the economy billions of dollars.

In the case of the Trump administration’s stalling the wage-data rule, lawyers say the central concern is whether officials talked to equal-pay advocates or conducted meaningful research before shutting it down.

The lawyers say the Office of Management and Budget has the legal right to block the measure but must meet certain legal requirements — namely, demonstrating that the EEOC failed to correctly assess the financial impact of the proposal on business-

“There are real questions here about whether the applicable legal standards were met and whether this stay is valid.”

Emily Martin, general counsel at the National Women’s Law Center

es, or that the agency did not conduct a proper public review.

“There are real questions here about whether the applicable legal standards were met and whether this stay is valid,” Martin said.

The EEOC’s revised datacollection process, which would have gone into force in March, would have required firms with 100 or more employees to provide extra employee and salary information to the agency on an existing form, known as the EEO-1.

The new rule would have grouped workers into 12 wage bands, ranging from $19,000 and under to $208,000 and beyond.

The EEOC estimated that the additional data collection would cost $25 million per year, or about $416 per company.

The Chamber, however, put the cost at $1.3 billion per year.

“This is a huge additional cost for companies of all sizes, yet has no accompanying benefit, or protections for the confidentiality of the information to be gathered,” the business lobby group wrote in an open letter.

After Trump launched his deregulation agenda, Neomi Rao, who heads the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, stayed the rule, saying in an Aug. 29 letter to the new acting head of the EEOC that the requirement was unnecessarily burdensome and lacked “practical utility.”

Victoria Lipnic, whom Trump appointed in January as acting chair of the EEOC, publicly expressed concerns about the rule in April. Neither Rao nor Lipnic responded to requests for comment.