THE Obama administration on Friday, Jan. 29, announced new rules aimed at ensuring equal pay for all American workers.
The proposal would require companies with more than 100 employees to annually report to the federal government how much they pay their employees with a breakdown of the employees’ ethnicity, gender and race.
Friday’s announcement coincided with the seventh anniversary of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first bill President Barack Obama signed into law when he took office in 2009. The act makes it easier for employees to challenge unequal pay.
“Women are not getting the fair shot that we believe every single American deserves,” Obama said in the proposal announcement. “What kind of example does paying women less set for our sons and daughters?”
Obama’s new rules would build on an executive order he issued about two years ago, which required federal contractors to provide salary data for men and women.
“Social change never happens overnight,” he said. “It is a slog and there are times when you just have to chip away and chip away…It’s reliant on all of us to keep pushing that boulder up the hill.”
Jenny Yang, chairwoman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, told The New York Times that the rules would be completed in September and reports would be due one year after.
“Too often, pay discrimination goes undetected because of a lack of accurate information about what people are paid,” Yang told the Times. “We will be using the information that we’re collecting as one piece of information that can inform our investigations.”
In 2014, women earned 79 cents for every dollar a man earned, the White House reported. The White House Council of Economic Advisers states that the US gender wage gap is 2.5 percent higher than the average developed country.
However, Pew Research reported in April that it found the gender pay gap to be less than what the White House claimed. The report stated that women earn 84 percent of what men do, while the wage gap for younger women stands at 93 percent of what men are paid.
Compliance with the new rules is expected to cost each employer less than $400 in the first year, according to White House estimates, and several hundred dollars per year after that.
Obama is also looking to push Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would provide additional resources to women seeking to challenge pay discrimination.
“I don’t think this is an empty move,” Robyn Muncy, interim chair of women’s studies and a history professor at the University of Maryland, said of the new pay data proposal, according to NBC News. “I think it can have a very galvanizing, conscious-raising effect on people.”
Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.com, who was enlisted by the White House to help make its case for the rules, said that although he never planned on paying women less than men, he found out his company was doing just that after two female workers raised that concern with him, according to the Times.
“We’re never going to solve this issue of pay inequality if CEOs like myself and others continue to turn a blind eye to what’s happening in their own corporations,” Benioff said in a conference call organized by the White House, noting he was spending $3 million to eliminate the pay gap at his firm, the Times reported.
Not everyone touted the White House’s pay gap logic, however. Other critics say that the metric used by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics is not the most accurate measurement.
A new report by Payscale suggests that “men are simply more likely to hold higher-paying jobs, whether it’s because of the industry, job type, or job level.”
Obama’s actions on pay equality have also been criticized by Republicans, who say that gender discrimination is already illegal and that extra measures are unnecessary. Additionally, the new rules would require the president to use his executive authority, for which Republicans have further criticized him.
