Virginia Foxx: “And I rise in opposition to the en bloc amendments. Madam Speaker, in America, discriminating in pay based on sex is…”

“And I rise in opposition to the en bloc amendments. Madam Speaker, in America, discriminating in pay based on sex is illegal, as codified in the Equal Pay Act and the Civil Rights Act. Democrats claim H.R. 7 will improve upon these bipartisan laws to create new opportunities for women to fight pay discrimination. What H.R. 7 actually does is create new opportunities for trial lawyers to earn higher paychecks while offering no new protections for pay discrimination in the workplace. Unfortunately, I cannot support any of the Democrat amendments to H.R. 7 because none of them addresses the numerous unworkable and onerous provisions in the bill. I appreciate that Representative Beyer's amendment recognizes the very serious problems with H.R. 7 by attempting to place a fig leaf on the expansive government data collection mandate in the bill. However, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, EEOC, is still required to implement the draconian data collection scheme in the underlying bill, which is still extremely misguided, expensive, and unnecessary. H.R. 7 requires business owners to submit reams of pay data to the EEOC disaggregated by job category, race, sex, and ethnicity. Moreover, the collection mandate also includes other employment-related data, including hiring, termination, and promotion data, which even the discredited 2016 Obama administration pay data collection scheme did not include.…”