To Shine A Light On Salary Gaps, Obama Wants Companies To Disclose Pay Data
Source: NPR
The Obama administration is proposing a new rule to address unequal pay practices by requiring companies with more than 100 employees to submit salary data by race, gender and ethnicity.
The announcement comes seven years after President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act — his first piece of legislation as president — which makes it easier for women to challenge discriminatory pay in court.
In repeating the call for equal pay, the White House noted that the median wage of full-time female workers in America is 79 percent of a man's median earnings. That's a slight bump up from the 77-cents-on-the-dollar statistic, based on older numbers, that the White House has often alluded to before.
The comparison of median earnings is sometimes criticized as a crude metric for the gender pay gap. Economists have found that if you control for a host of factors, the pay gap is smaller — but persistent. The gap varies widely based on a woman's age and her race. It also shifts depending which industry you look at.
Read more: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/29/464856100/to-shine-a-light-on-salary-gaps-obama-wants-companies-to-disclose-pay-data
I'm not sure what to think of this. Much that I've read (even on liberal blogs) seems to say that the $.77 statistic is a political bumper sticker, and that even the people that use it know it isn't true but repeat it often anyway because it's so powerful.
I want to see a mechanism to see that discrimination is detected and punished, but as the husband of someone who works in HR, I do feel sorry for yet another reporting requirement for employers. I know my husband's company is still trying to figure out how they're going to get all the data they're now required to report for the ACA; this is not going to be welcome news for him and the rest of his HR team.
Not to mention that the government, while it gleefully applies very strict privacy laws (such as HIPAA) on private entities, has not shown itself to be capable of complying with its own rules. This is highly sensitive data on tens of millions of individuals that is now going to have to be (somehow) safely transmitted to and stored by the government. I'm more than a little skeptical.
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LanternWaste
(37,748 posts)" I do feel sorry for yet another reporting requirement for employers..."
Really little more than one additional column in the spreadsheet. Ten minutes to set up. I set up something similiar for the HR dept at my office just after the AHCA was implemented while the IT guy was on vacation.
MadDAsHell
(2,067 posts)on ACA reporting alone since November.
1000+ page laws tend to do that to you.
No to mention, what is with the President's outdated use of the word "gender"?? 
closeupready
(29,503 posts)Or better yet, "jollux"?
MadDAsHell
(2,067 posts)They know what their laws/rules/regulations look like on paper, not in practice.
I think it'd be eye opening for legislators, Presidents, etc. to spend a day with a front-line employee responsible for enforcing their laws to see what compliance actually requires.
LanternWaste
(37,748 posts)I'm afraid I have little problem with transparency laws ensuring equitable pay for equitable work. I'm afraid my company has had little problems implementing any of the new laws put forth by Pres. Obama.
In his award winning oral history of WW2, Stud Terkel interviewed a Revenue employee just after the code revision in 1942. A Nevada company owner asked him, "why do you need 3000 pages to instruct us on what 30 pages could do?" The revenue rep replied, "because every time we kept it simple, too many people would find a loophole to avoid paying their fair share. The first thirty pages are all you need to read... unless you're trying to get out of paying-- then by all means, you should read the other 2730 pages."
MadDAsHell
(2,067 posts)LanternWaste
(37,748 posts)No idea to what you're referring to. I simply responded (rather civilly) to your OP and reply, and added a relevant anecdotal device to hopefully make it even more clear.
I'd love to see the link to your allegation, though.
Angel Martin
(942 posts)the less people know about what is actually involved, the easier it looks...
shenmue
(38,506 posts)
wildeyed
(11,243 posts)Kick!
Response to MadDAsHell (Original post)
Pakhet This message was self-deleted by its author.
A Little Weird
(1,754 posts)You can look up an individual by name, look up everyone in a particular agency, or lookup everyone by job class. You can't compare by gender although that might be an interesting way to look at it. There's definitely room for improvement but I don't think it's a bad system. I think it's doable, they just need to give employers enough time to get a good system set up.
http://opendoor.ky.gov/search/Pages/SalarySearch.aspx
