Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2018

Floor Speech

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Mr. Chairman, everyone here appreciates concerns about the ways of discrimination. The question is how to collect the data in an efficient way, and the new EEOC-1 form is certainly not the way to collect that data.
What do I mean by that, Mr. Chairman? You have to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges. It is not like we don't collect data already. We have 140 different data points on the EEOC-1 form. This would increase the number of data points to 3,306 that an employer potentially would have to report.

Mr. Chairman, if we had better data, that is all right, but let's take a specific example: a large hospital. The new form groups all professionals together. A hospital would have to report what it pays its professionals in the same category, what it pays its female professionals and its male professionals. But, Mr. Chairman, it includes nurses and surgeons in the same category. They are all professionals. In fact, in the United States, for instance, among registered nurses, we have about 3 million--89 percent--are females.

Now, in the United States, we have an estimated number of physicians and surgeons of about 900,000; 65 percent are males, only 35 percent females. They are all grouped in the same category for the EEOC-1 form.
So what would the result be? If you were in a hospital and you had nurses and you had employee surgeons, it would look like you were discriminating against women because the nurses get paid less, and your average salary is going to be less for your women because you have grouped surgeons in with nurses. Only a Federal Government bureaucrat could come up with an idea like that in order to gauge whether wage discrimination occurs.

The fact of the matter is it is even worse, Mr. Chairman, because, based on the reporting of these results, EEOC can go on a fishing expedition against whatever institution it wants to that files this. And if we don't think that happens, Mr. Chairman, I am just going to say two words: Lois Lerner.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Culberson), the chairman of the subcommittee, and I want to thank the chairman for attaching this section to the bill. It is an important section for our employers.

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Mr. Chairman, I just say that it is absolutely true if we were looking at similar work, but the bill does not look at similar work. It looks at huge categories like, for instance, professionals in a hospital that include neurosurgeons and nurses. It is not similar work.

This is the worst kind of data gathering you can have by the Federal Government because, again, they use this to go after employers that they want to go after.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. Chair, I thank the gentleman from New York for his remarks. No one is naive enough to think that discrimination doesn't exist.

The question is: What tools should the Federal Government use? And this certainly is not the tool that is helpful.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. Chair, I agree with the gentleman. Pay disparities exist, but we need a precise tool. If we are going to give the Federal Government a tool with which to investigate and punish employers, it should be a surgical tool. This is not a surgical tool. This is an imprecise tool.

The EEOC, again, Mr. Chairman, has 3,360 data points. It groups high-wage professionals with low-wage professionals, and has nothing to do with discrimination. It is an imprecise tool. We should retain the language in the bill.

Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

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