Resource: Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, NWLC v. OMB

In August 2016, after six years of analysis, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission concluded that collecting aggregate pay data based on sex, race, ethnicity, and job type from large employers was necessary to enforce the nation’s civil rights laws. But in August 2017, the Trump administration abruptly reversed the prior approval of this data collection. Just one year after OMB approved the pay data collection, the OIRA Administrator ordered the EEOC to stay the data collection in a memorandum that was barely over one page long. The memo contradicted the EEOC’s conclusion that the data was critical to enforcing anti-discrimination and related civil rights laws and instead claimed there was no “practical utility” to the pay data collection.