WhatFinger

The dismantling of the harassment state continues

Trump nixes Obama rule that required employers to submit massive reports on who gets paid what

By Dan Calabrese ——--September 1, 2017

American Politics, News | CFP Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us

This and many other Obama policies like it were pure and simple harassment. Their purpose was to intimidate businesses into complying with left-wing notions of what the workplace should be like while providing the federal government with lots of information it could misuse to justify the further creep of the regulatory state. Before Obama, companies of a certain size (and all federal contractors) already had to provide the feds with certain data points about their workforce - on average 180 data points per company, which sounds substantial because it is. Obama ratcheted that up, just a tad, to where companies had to submit an average of 3,660 data points. And that included data about what they pay, broken down by race, sex . . . all the usual things Democrats wax on about. It was a hunt for anecdotes about racism and sexism, as well as a massive usurpation of businesses' time, money and other resources.
And this week, the Trump Administration brought this travesty to an end:
The Office of Management and Budget on Tuesday stayed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) rule dealing with a bureaucratic form known as EEO-1. The old EEO-1 required federal contractors and any company with more than 100 employees to submit data about their workforces—including breakdowns by race, ethnicity, gender and job category. In 2016 Team Obama added a demand for data on pay, effective March 2018. The rule is a typical end-run around Congress, which refused to enact President Obama’s Paycheck Fairness Act that would have enabled such wage-data collection. Mr. Obama also tried to coerce such data through the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. When that failed, EEOC got the mission. The Trump OMB cited the exorbitant cost and hassle of compliance for staying the rule, and that’s reason enough. The old EEO-1 form required about 180 pieces of information, while the Obama form increased that 20-fold to 3,660 data points per report. The Obama EEOC said the rule would cost about $50 million a year and 1.9 million hours to comply. But a Chamber of Commerce survey found the direct compliance costs alone would be closer to $400 million and eight million hours of labor. Add indirect overhead and annual costs jumped to $1.3 billion.
The Paperwork Reduction Act requires agencies to show that regulations have value and to minimize their cost. Yet the new EEO-1 form would have provided little real insight into pay disparity. The form would not have provided information about employee experience, education, flex-time, benefits, hours worked, or myriad other factors that go into pay decisions. The rule would have created a sweeping data base that bureaucrats could manipulate to engineer accusations against corporations. Recall how the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau inferred discrimination in auto lending based on borrower names likes Johnson. The EEOC can already subpoena pay information if it has a credible allegation of discrimination.
I don't think the average person has any idea what it costs companies to comply with nonsense regulations like this. Between the HR manpower to gather the data and fill out the forms, to the consultants and regulatory compliance experts who make sure you did it right, this can be a massively significant cost for companies who are then bashed by politicians for their wage levels, or for favoring lower corporate tax rates. Obama used to say he believed in capitalism, but that he didn't think it was really a fair system without significant government intervention into markets and into the operation of individual companies. In other words, Obama didn't believe in capitalism at all. He saw businesses as pools of money to raid, and the ability to harass them via the regulatory state was a great bit of leverage to use in shaking them down for both money and information.

Support Canada Free Press

Donate
The political class would have you believe the Trump presidency is a dumpster fire because of all the palace intrigue and the lack of major legislative achievements. But legislative achievements are the work of the legislative branch. And people coming and going happens in every administration, even if it does seem to happen with a bit more aplomb in this one. What really matters is the governing choices the president makes. And when he's been able to act at the executive level - whether on energy development, regulatory reform or on policies like this, President Trump has made many more good choices than bad ones. We suspected when Trump took office that he would have a tremendous opportunity to do good just by reducing all the horrible abuses of executive power his predecessor had perpetrated. In this respect, Trump has certainly not disappointed. This may not seem like a big exciting development, but within the halls of the companies that create jobs and drive our economy, believe me, it is.
Subscribe

View Comments
Dan Calabrese——

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

Follow all of Dan’s work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.

VIEW Comments

Sponsored