In January 2016, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) proposed significant changes to annual EEO-1 reports in an attempt to pinpoint causes and incidents of paydiscrimination across the country. Currently, the EEO-1 report tracks just race, ethnicity, and sex within 10 job categories offered by private employers and federal contractors with 100 or more employees. The recently proposed changes expand upon how those 10 job categories are tracked by also including 12 payment tiers for salaried workers.
While the idea of having to sort through every employee’s salary amount and tracking them accordingly is already causing frustrations for employers, this is not the end of the proposal. The EEOC also wants to know how many hours each employee works a week, or is expected to work each week. To track this information, another all-new form would need to be generated and then compared to the adjusted EEO-1 form.
Is the Effort Worth the Outcome?
Employers are also anticipating trouble arising from the EEO-1 form’s current due date of September 30th. In order to track salary and hours worked, W-2 data would be required. The problem is that most employers understandably do not have W-2’s completely ready until the end of the taxable year, so around December or January. For some smaller employers, making the adjustment to prepare their W-2’s that much earlier is a huge inconvenience, or possibly not a reasonable option.
Other opponents to the changes fear that the expanded report does nothing to find real discrimination in the system due to relying solely on numbers and not on related information to an employee’s earnings. For example, the EEO-1 report can show that a handful of people of a certain sex and ethnicity are making much more on average than those not within that group. It does not say why, though, and could overlook important employment factors like education, work history and experience, seniority, and so on.
It should be interesting to see how the EEOC’s proposed changes to EEO-1 reports play out, and our Houston employment law attorneys will be tracking the story as it develops here on our employment law blog. If you need help with an employment law matter of your own, or require our professional legal representation, you can contact Moore & Associates by calling 713.581.9001 today.
