Human Rights signs amicus brief in pay-data suit.

Byline: Kevin Featherly

The Minnesota Department of Human Rights has signed on as an amicus to oppose the Trump administration's appeal of a lawsuit over demographic pay data.

In 2017, Trump's Office of Management and Budget canceled an Obama-era reform that required private businesses to submit employee pay databroken down by hours worked and by race, sex and ethnicityto the federal government.

Known in government parlance as "Component 2 Data," that information was to be submitted to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and from there made available to the various states.

In November 2017, the National Women's Law Center and the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement sued the EEOC and OMB to revive the program. In its complaint, the organizations argued that, through its "interference," OMB had blocked "EEOC's ability to enforce the nation's civil rights laws."

In March, District of Columbia U.S. District Court Judge Tanya S. Chutkan awarded summary judgment to plaintiffs and resurrected the program. OMB's decision to stay collection was illegal, she ruled.

The administration carried its case to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on May 3, prompting Minnesota's Human Rights Department to sign the amicus brief. It joins a big coalition of state governments led by California, along with various other state Human Rights departments and commissions.

Minnesota's portion of the amicus emphasizes that the state has some of the widest disparities in the nation.

In an interview Tuesday, Human Rights Commissioner Rebecca Lucero said that some of the biggest gaps are in areas like unemployment, home ownership, educational attainment and poverty.

"Poverty amongst whites in Minnesota is about 7%, while the rate is more than four times higher at 32% for blacks," Lucero said. "That's the third biggest gap in the country."

When it announced in a September memo that it planned not to renew the program, the EEOC said the data...