Attention Operators: You Won't Have to Report Pay by Gender, Race After All

When President Trump took office, he vowed to take steps to make life easier for business operators. The White House just announced one step in that direction would be reversing an Obama administration decision to make employers, including urgent care operators, report how much they paid workers and break down the data by gender, race, and ethnicity. Obama believed doing so would help quantify (and ultimately curb) pay discrimination, while Trump maintains that the process only serves to burden businesses, thereby making it more difficult to focus efforts on the business itself. Neomi Rao, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, called the proposed rule, which would have taken effect next spring, “enormously burdensome”—and largely ineffective. “We don’t believe it would actually help us gather information about wage and employment discrimination.” She went on to note that forcing businesses to collect that level of data “[does] not adequately address privacy and confidentiality issues,” clearly a great concern in the medical field all around.