The
Trump administration is not eliminating
workplace discrimination. It
is eliminating the receipts.
On
July 23, the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission (EEOC) proposed
abolishing the EEO-1 report and five related
workforce reports. For
nearly sixty years, EEO-1 has required large
private employers to
report the race, ethnicity and sex of their
employees across major
occupational categories. The information
helps us see who gets hired,
who advances, who remains clustered at the
bottom and who never gets
through the door. Now the federal government
proposes to stop
collecting it.
This
is far more than bureaucratic housekeeping.
It is the deliberate
destruction of evidence. Without data,
disparities cannot be
adequately documented; without
documentation, discrimination becomes
more difficult to prove. An administration
already committed to
declaring our nation colorblind will then be
free to point to the
absence of evidence - an absence it created
- as evidence that
inequality no longer exists.
First
they deny inequality. Then they destroy the
evidence. Finally, they
declare the problem solved.
The
EEO-1 report has been collected since 1966,
just two years after
passage of the Civil Rights Act. Private
employers with at least 100
workers, along with certain federal
contractors with at least 50,
have been required to provide workforce
demographic information.
Approximately 110,000 employers are covered.
While that is less than
2 percent of the nation’s nearly 6 million
employer firms, these
are among our largest employers and
collectively employ a substantial
share of the American workforce.
The
proposed rule goes beyond private employers.
It would also eliminate
reports covering unions, state and local
governments, public school
systems, apprenticeship programs and
institutions of higher
education, as well as some of the
record-keeping requirements
associated with those reports. The
administration is not simply
turning off the camera; it is also proposing
to throw away the film.
The
EEOC contends that these reports are
burdensome, of limited
usefulness and potentially unconstitutional
because they classify
workers by race and sex. That reasoning
turns civil-rights
enforcement on its head. In the twisted
logic of this political
moment, counting racial inequality is
treated as a form of racial
discrimination, while actual discrimination
is rendered invisible.
Collecting
information about race is not the same as
discriminating by race. A
thermometer does not cause a fever, nor does
a scale cause weight
gain. Data do not create inequality; they
reveal it. Indeed, without
data, claims of equal opportunity are little
more than corporate
advertising.
The
EEOC estimates that eliminating the
reporting requirements would save
employers and the federal government about
$278 million annually,
including approximately $273 million for
private employers. That
sounds like a large amount until it is
compared with the economic
cost of workplace discrimination. Wage
disparities, occupational
segregation, biased hiring and blocked
promotions cost workers - and
the larger economy - far more than employers
spend completing a
report.
Furthermore,
businesses already collect much of this
information through their
payroll and human-resources systems. The
real burden may not be
gathering the numbers but being held
accountable for what those
numbers reveal.
EEO-1
data are hardly perfect. The report does not
tell us everything about
pay, promotions, discrimination or workplace
culture; it offers a
snapshot rather than a full biography.
Still, snapshots matter. They
can reveal whether Black women are
concentrated in administrative and
support positions while white men dominate
senior management. They
can expose the distance between a company’s
carefully worded
commitment to diversity and its actual
employment practices.
Such
patterns do not prove every individual
allegation of discrimination,
but they tell investigators where to look.
They allow employers to
identify problems before those problems
become lawsuits, while giving
researchers and policymakers a way to
measure progress - or the lack
of it. Eliminating the data will not make
workplaces more equal; it
will simply make inequality easier to
conceal.
This
attack on EEO-1 reporting is part of a
broader war on facts. The
Trump administration has attacked diversity,
equity and inclusion
programs, weakened federal contracting
protections and attempted to
purge race-conscious analysis from
government. It apparently wants a
nation in which racial inequality may be
experienced but not
measured, described but not documented,
protested but not proved.
Black
workers know better, and so do women who
continue to encounter
occupational segregation and unequal
opportunity. We know that
fairness cannot be measured by a corporate
slogan or a glossy
photograph featuring a carefully assembled
rainbow of employees. It
must be measured by who is hired, what they
earn, where they work,
whether they advance and who holds power.
Data
are instruments of democratic accountability
because they allow
ordinary people to compare promises with
performance. That is
precisely why those who resist
accountability want the numbers
buried. The proposed elimination of EEO-1
reporting is not
colorblindness but willful blindness - a
declaration that the federal
government would prefer not to know what is
happening inside American
workplaces.
Inequality
does not disappear when government closes
its eyes. When the people
charged with enforcing equal opportunity
stop collecting the
evidence, they are not being neutral. They
are choosing concealment
over accountability and darkness over the
illumination that data
provide.
