Paycheck Fairness Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. BEYER. Madam Chair, I am a businessman. I am also the father of three daughters.

I have managed people and managed compensation plans for more than 40 years, and I know that we cannot manage what we do not measure. I agree with my friend, the Republican congresswoman from New York, that men and women should be paid equally for equal work. This should be a bedrock principle of our democracy.

But if we don't gather the data, how will we ever know if there is paycheck fairness?

My middle daughter is a computer programmer--well paid. She was dismayed to learn around Christmastime that her male counterparts doing exactly the same work were making more money.

It is a fiction that this will be a burden on employers with more than 100 employees. Absolutely none of these employers have not digitized their paycheck process decades ago. The collection of this data requires a keystroke; that is all. All the data, already there, already gathered.

Pay transparency is the most powerful way to achieve paycheck fairness.

Men and women together are outraged when they see actual measured pay unfairness. But where incomes are most fair, where they are most transparent--in the military and in government--paycheck inequity is small or even nonexistent.

This is not a bill for lawyers. This is a bill for business owners and business managers who want to do the right thing and now will have the data to do that right thing.

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Mr. BEYER. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, as a small business owner and employer, I understand the value of data because you can't improve what you don't measure. So my amendment, which I offer with Representative Ilhan Omar, exempts employers with fewer than 100 employees from reporting compensation data and only requires those with more than 100 to do so.

Employers already report workforce data by race, sex, and ethnicity across 10 different job categories in their annual EEO-1 submission to the EEOC. So collecting this data simply ensures equal pay for equal work. If employers value the standard, this is an easy start.

I am very grateful to Chairman Scott and the leadership on the amendments to strengthen pay data collection and to Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro for her years and years of effort on this.

Persistent pay gaps exist in the U.S. workforce to correlate with sex, race, and ethnicity. The Congress has found that 64.6 percent of the wage gap can be explained by three factors: experience, industry, and occupation, the things my good friend from North Carolina pointed out. But the remaining 35 percent can't be explained by these differences.

Federal law specifically prohibits men and women from being paid differently for work, but enforcement of this mandate is impeded by a lack of knowledge--no data, not reliable data, especially data by sex and by race. This is a barrier to closing the persistent pay gap for women and minorities.

All we are really asking here is to be able to provide the data so that business leaders can make the good decisions and so that employees can discover if they are being unfairly paid. They have a right, then, to ask.

For over 50 years, companies have used the EEO-1 form to report. Earlier today, we have heard that this will represent an unfair burden on businesses.

While virtually every business I know--even those with two, three, and four employees--find ways to outsource paycheck preparation, almost all of this has been digitized. But to be extra cautious and make sure that we are not providing any burden on small business, this amendment would exempt those with 100 employees or less.

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Mr. BEYER. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the distinguished majority leader.

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Mr. BEYER. Mr. Chairman, I thank my friend from North Carolina for supporting this amendment, and I thank my friend from North Carolina for clearly stating a number of times today that Democrats and Republicans are both committed to equal pay for men and for women.

I think our differences just come down to how we accomplish that, because 50 years after the Equal Pay Act was signed, there are still significant differences, despite our joint commitment to equal pay.

If unequal pay continues to persist, how do we address it? We simply say that the collection of data to the EEO-1 is the best way to move forward. The employers with less than 100 have been exempted from the very beginning of the EEO-1 report, so this is simply consistent with that and recognizes that, to get meaningful data, sometimes you need more than a handful of people. That is, 6 or 10 or 12 people don't necessarily give you an apples-to-apples comparison. When you get more than 100, you can do it.

The government already collects the sensitive data. It has done it for years without privacy concerns. My friend pointed out there may be 3,200 or 3,600 categories. Right now, with deep learning and machine learning, this is something that takes a microsecond to do. This is very easy. We are now in an intellectual and digital world where we can have the EEO discover which companies have persistent patterns of pay inequity, and it really works.

All our offices have pay transparency. When I am trying to figure out how much to pay a legislative correspondent or legislative director or front office, I know that everyone can go online and figure out what everyone else is making. That is a powerful incentive for us to make sure that people are paid fairly and paid equally. All we are trying to do is bring the same transparency to American businesses across the country.

Mr. Chair, I thank my friend for her support of this amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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