Ivanka Trump, who has cast herself as a champion of working women, supports her father’s plan to nix a law supporting equal pay for working women.
The law, approved by President Obama in January 2016, would have required employers to document employee pay by gender, race and ethnicity. Employers with more than 100 employees would have been required to submit that information to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
This week President Trump announced he was canceling the law, and Ivanka Trump issued a statement supporting him.
“Ultimately, while I believe the intention was good and agree that pay transparency is important, the proposed policy would not yield the intended results,” she said. “We look forward to continuing to work with [the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission], [the Office of Management and Budget], Congress and all relevant stakeholders on robust policies aimed at eliminating the gender wage gap.”
She did not specify what those policies would be or when they would be drafted or enacted.
Additionally, the White House said that the Obama-era law would have violated the Paperwork Reduction Act. “It’s enormously burdensome,” Neomi Rao an administrator from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs said. “We don’t believe it would actually help us gather information about wage and employment discrimination.”
Women’s rights groups expressed anger at her move.
“Equal pay experts worked hard on this rule, but somehow @IvankaTrump on her own decided this policy ‘would not yield the intended results’,” tweeted the National Women’s Law Center.
Ivanka Trump has previously come under fire before for issuing supportive bromides about working women that don’t align with action. The week of the release of her book “Women Who Work,” it was revealed that she did not originally support a maternity-leave policy at her company and that Chinese workers make her branded clothes and shoes earn about $1 a week.
At her behest, in May President Trump included a paid-leave program in his 2018 budget. It was called the “world’s worst parental leave plan,” by the founder of the nonprofit Paid Leave for the United States, for relying heavily on unemployment insurance while coinciding with brutal cuts to Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and food stamps.
