Omar can point to a document filed with the SEC for her data point and can certainly raise pointed questions about the pay gap at McDonald’s between the chief executive and the typical worker. But her statement lacks context. The $7,000 figure is for a part-time worker in Poland, not a full-time worker in the United States as she suggested.

If you listen to techno-dystopians, the outlook for workers is grim. Robots are already taking over repetitive human tasks, and soon they’ll come for the rest. But what’s striking about the later stages of the U.S.’s 10-year-old expansion is how labor-intensive it’s been, with 2.7 million jobs added last year. Smarter machines, it turns out, often require more people.

More and more, firms including Oracle and Palantir Technologies argue that detailed, government-mandated figures on the number of women and people of color they employ must remain confidential. Making them public, they say, would be tantamount to giving away proprietary technology and hand competitors a “road map” to poach talent.