New Steps to Advance Equal Pay

On the anniversary of the signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, President Obama highlighted several actions that his Administration is taking to further advance equal pay for all workers.

• EEOC Action on Pay Data Collection:  The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), in partnership with the Department of Labor, is publishing a proposal to annually collect summary pay data by gender, race, and ethnicity from businesses with 100 or more employees.  The proposal would cover over 63 million employees.  This step – stemming from a recommendation of the President’s Equal Pay Task Force and a Presidential Memorandum issued in April 2014 – will help focus public enforcement of equal pay laws and provide better insight into discriminatory pay practices across industries and occupations. It expands on and replaces an earlier plan by the Department of Labor to collect similar information from federal contractors.

The EEOC is proposing revisions to its longstanding EEO-1 form to require all employers with 100 or more employees, not just contractors, who currently submit the EEO-1 to submit additional summary data on wages paid to their employees, including by gender, race, and ethnicity. As currently proposed, this information would be reported across 10 job categories and by 12 pay bands, and will not require the reporting of specific salaries of each individual employee.  The proposal is broader than one previously published by the Department of Labor, which would have applied only to federal contractors.

This new policy will encourage and facilitate greater voluntary compliance by employers with existing federal pay laws – by evaluating how they are currently paying their employees.  It will also assist the EEOC, and in the case of contractors the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), in better focusing investigations on employers that are unlawfully shortchanging workers based on their gender, race, or ethnicity.  In addition to expanding the scope of the data collection, the new approach will utilize an existing data collection mechanism familiar to most businesses, as many commenters had proposed.  In so doing, the proposed revisions have the potential to lower the compliance burden on businesses and the implementation costs to government. Under the proposal, employers would first submit pay data as of the September 30, 2017 EEO-1 filing deadline.

The proposed revision of the EEO-1 form will follow the normal procedures and public comment process required under the Paperwork Reduction Act before it can be implemented.  Anyone who wants to comment on the proposal will have 60 days after publication in the Federal Register to do so.  You can find additional information on the EEOC's website here.