President Obama announced new rules Friday that give the federal government power to police pay disparities between gender and race and use that information to publicly humiliate any large company paying women or minorities lower than white male counterparts.
Ensuring dazzling impact, Obama made the announcement on the seventh anniversary of the very first piece of legislation he signed as president: the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which loosened restrictions on employees who wanted to sue for pay discrimination.
Now, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has the power to go after companies with 100 or more employees and require them to submit salary information, race and gender of each employee. This way, if the information indicates a disparity, the EEOC can launch an investigation and will be allowed to publicly name the company if any are entered into lawsuits.
According to The Washington Post, "The rule does not need congressional approval and is expected to be greenlighted by the Office of Management and Budget."
During his announcement, Obama said every girl needs to be ensured that they can pursue their dreams as far as they will take her and added that more females need to be pushed into high-paying STEM fields:
The notion that somehow we would be keeping my daughters… or any of your daughters out of opportunity, not allowing them to thrive in every field… it's counterproductive. That's not how we're gonna build a bright future for our country.
It has been against federal law to discriminate through salary since 1963, but that isn't stopping the Obama administration from meddling. White House officials are saying that pay discrimination goes undetected because of a lack of accurate information from companies.
But there are those that believe this is government overreach, plain and simple. WaPo quotes a president of a pay-equity consulting firm who said the proposal is already undermined because the job categories are incredibly broad and will not accurately reflect what income is expected for "professionals," when that, as an example, could include comparing a doctor's salary with a social worker.
Yet, the White House is in full propaganda mode, sending out e-mail reminders that America is "one step closer to equal pay." In one of them, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, is siding with the president's actions by informing us of what he has done at his own company:
[W]e are spending $3 million on closing the gap so that women and men are paid equally at Salesforce, and we’ve instilled equality as one of the core values of our company.
The President has said that a world in which women are treated as equal to men is safer, more stable, and more prosperous -- and I wholeheartedly agree. I believe that businesses are more successful when equality is built into the fabric of the company.
"It didn’t occur to me that inequality could creep into our company culture at Salesforce. We then looked at the salary of every employee in the company, and it turned out we did have a pay gap," Benioff stated. "This was a complete surprise to me."
"Going forward, we will be judged on whether we made the world a more equitable place for all," he added.
With this rollout comes the age-old fallacy that women make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. This has been an inaccurate statistic for years nows -- except in Obama's White House, which has been shown to pay women staffers 88 cents for every dollar a male staffer makes in the exact same job. Will he be the first to report these findings to the EEOC as a good example for all the others to follow?
We believe the correct answer is "no."
