EEO-1 Archives - Page 3 of 3

The Office of Management and Budget Hits the Brakes on the Revised EEO-1

Last year, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) unveiled its proposed revisions to the Employer Information Report EEO-1 (EEO-1). Previously, the EEO-1 directed federal contractors and employers with 100 or more employees to report annually the number of individuals that they employ by job category, race, ethnicity and gender in 10 different job groupings. As part of the Obama administration’s enhanced focus on equal pay, the EEOC’s proposed EEO-1 revisions aimed to expand the information collected to include pay data and working hours to help the EEOC discover potential discrimination in employment and pay equity.

The EEOC finalized its new EEO-1 in September 2016, and the additional information was to be provided by employers by the next reporting deadline in March 2018. That was the plan until the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) stepped in.

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Get Ready to Comply: All Signs Point to Enforcement of the Enhanced EEO-1 Form and Reporting Obligations

For approximately fifty years, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) has collected workforce data about race, gender, ethnicity and job category from all businesses with 100 or more employees, using the EEO-1 report. In an effort to combat pay discrimination, last year the EEOC announced that it finalized regulations expanding the information collected in the annual EEO-1 report to include pay data.

The revised EEO-1 form requires employers to collect aggregate W-2 earnings and report the number of employees in each of the twelve pay bands (spanning from $19,239 and under to $208,000 and over) for the ten EEO-1 job categories (Executive/Senior Level Officials and Managers; First/Mid Level Officials and Managers; Professionals; Technicians; Sales Workers; Administrative Support Workers; Craft Workers; Operatives; Laborers and Helpers; Service Workers) and classified by race, sex and ethnicity. The revised EEO-1 form has been largely criticized by employers claiming that the collection of W-2 earnings, without any context to explain legitimate non-discriminatory reasons for pay disparities (e.g., education, training, experience, tenure, merit, etc.) will unnecessarily open the door to increased scrutiny and investigations. To make matters worse, the EEOC has not been very forthcoming about how the information would be analyzed and used, other than as a “screening tool” to identify pay discrimination.

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2016 Presidential Election Aftermath: What Can be Expected in the Labor & Employment Law Space

We continue to analyze and assess what the 2016 election results mean in the Labor & Employment Law space, and what we can expect from a GOP White House, House and Senate. The last two times that this GOP alignment was present were 1929 and 2007 (let’s hope that the financial events that followed those two occasions – the Great Depression and the Great Recession – do not repeat themselves this time around).

It is difficult to predict what President Donald J. Trump’s actual agenda will be, because his campaign was long on broad concepts and very short on serious, detailed policy presentation. While Candidate Trump said many things, including contradictory things, about many topics, some themes can be discerned from pre-election and post-election comments. Also, some issues have been on the GOP wish list for some time, but until they could have the alignment of White House and Congress that will be in place in January, those wish list items, as a practical matter, were just wishes. Here are our impressions about what changes will occur.

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How to Comply With the EEO-1’s Proposed New Hours Reporting Requirements

As you may have heard, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) released revised EEO-1 reporting guidelines on July 13, 2016 (for an overview of the new guidance in its entirety, see EEOC Issues Revised EEO-1 Proposal). These new guidelines apply to employers with 100 or more employees and require them to report, among other things, hours worked by exempt and non-exempt employees, subdivided by gender, race, ethnicity, job classification, and pay band. For an example of the proposed new reporting form, click here. Although employers and other members of the public will have until August 15, 2016 to comment on the revised proposal, it is unlikely that any further substantive revisions will be made. Currently, it appears that employers will be required to submit the new EEO-1 form on March 31, 2018, giving them approximately a year and a half to prepare their recordkeeping systems to capture the newly required data. Therefore, employers are advised to review, and update if necessary, internal recordkeeping systems to be prepared to report hours worked, and pay data, for calendar year 2017 when filing the EEO-1 on March 31, 2018.

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EEOC Issues Revised EEO-1 Proposal

The EEOC published its revised proposal for the new EEO-1 report today. The revised proposal came after extensive, and polarized, comments on the EEOC’s prior proposal this Spring. The prior proposal revised the existing EEO-1 report to require disclosure of data on pay ranges and hours worked in addition to the already required reporting on workforce profiles by race, ethnicity and gender. The revised proposal released today still requires reporting of this data. The EEOC has not changed course on its plan to use the data to identify discriminatory pay practices and target companies for investigations and class action equal pay lawsuits – without having to identify an injured party plaintiff. The primary change in the revised proposal is that the first date by which employers will have to submit the new EEO-1 report has been moved from September 2017 to March 31, 2018. In addition to allowing more time for employers to prepare for the new report, the EEOC made this change to simplify reporting by allowing employers to use existing W-2 data from the 2017 calendar year for the 2018 report. The EEOC also provided options for calculating “hours worked” for exempt employees, and will not require employers to collect hours worked for exempt workers if they do not already track those hours.

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