On January 29, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) indicated in a news release that the executive branch agency, “[T]oday made public a proposed revision to the Employer Information Report (EEO-1) to include collecting pay data from employers, including federal contractors, with more than 100 employees. This new data will assist the agency in identifying possible pay discrimination and assist employers in promoting equal pay in their workplaces.”
The EEOC news release added that, “EEO-1 data provides the federal government with workforce profiles from private sector employers by race, ethnicity, sex, and job category. This proposal would add aggregate data on pay ranges and hours worked to the information collected, beginning with the September 2017 report. Proposed changes are available for inspection on the Federal Register website and will be officially published in the Federal Register on February 1, 2016. Members of the public have 60 days from that date April 1, 2016, to submit comments.”
This news development was summarized on the front page of The Washington Post on January 30: “President Obama laid out new rules Friday that would require every big company to report salaries based on race, gender and ethnicity, setting up the federal government to actively police pay disparities that have resisted other efforts at reform.
“Armed with that data, the [EEOC] could target companies accused of paying women less than their male counterparts with investigations and lawsuits. Any lawsuit would cause the company to be publicly named. The same would be true of pay disparities between minorities and whites.”
And an article at The Wall Street Journal Online explained that, “EEOC Chair Jenny Yang said she expects the administrative burden of gathering compensation data to be relatively light, since employers will essentially be adding a few columns to the report they already file.
“Statisticians and economists note, however, that analyzing wage disparities is a complex undertaking, and that aggregating data about many occupations is especially tricky.”
Meanwhile, an article in the Los Angeles Times on January 30 pointed out that, “The U.S. Chamber of Commerce criticized the additional federal reporting requirements as too burdensome.”
EEOC Chair Jenny Yang discussed this development in greater detail today on The Diane Rehm Show (WAMU- National Public Radio).
