The wage deduction should be conditioned on employers auditing for racial pay gaps

Evidence

Tax reform should require employers seeking any wage deductions to conduct their own audits, which would be made public, to determine whether similarly situated workers are being treated differently—either in the type of jobs they are offered or in the pay they are awarded. Nonprofits have to publish the salaries of their highest-paid employees to receive their tax exemptions; given the benefit-based tax breaks most employers are able to enjoy, regardless of internal bias or discrimination, why can’t we require something similar from for-profit companies? If there are racial gaps, or if most black workers are concentrated in low-paying jobs, the employer should work to remedy the problem. After a period of doing such work, perhaps three to five years, if there are still gaps, then the employer would no longer be allowed to deduct employee wages on its tax return. Tax policy should be used to combat, not reinforce, market-based race discrimination. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 412

Categorization

• SEED: The wage-deduction-as-conditioned-subsidy proposal is a concrete, nameable reform with a mechanism an explainer piece could walk through.
• XREF: connects to: Wage deductions could be revoked from employers with persistent racial pay gaps. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax…, 412; Racial distinctions can be deployed as economic discrimination devices — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2318
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Wage deductions could be revoked from employers with persistent racial pay gaps. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax…, 412; Racial distinctions can be deployed as economic discrimination devices — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2318