On January 29, 2016, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced a proposed revision to the Employer Information Report (EEO-1) to add collecting pay data from employers, including federal contractors, with 100 or more employees. This new data will assist the agency in identifying possible pay discrimination and help employers promote equal pay in their workplaces.
Currently, the EEO-1 report, which private sector employers must file annually, provides the EEOC with workforce profiles by race, ethnicity, gender, and job category. The proposal would add aggregate data on pay ranges and hours worked to the information collected, beginning with the September 2017 report. Every employer with 100 or more employees would be required to report by job category the number of employees by race, ethnicity, and gender, who are paid within each of 12 proposed pay bands (i.e., pay ranges), as well as the total hours worked by the employees in each band. W-2 earnings would be used to determine the pay band within which a particular employee would fit.
The new pay data would provide EEOC and the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) with insight into pay disparities across industries and occupations and strengthen federal efforts to combat discrimination. This pay data would allow the EEOC to compile and publish aggregated data that will help employers in conducting their own analysis of their pay practices to facilitate voluntary compliance. The agencies would use this pay data to assess complaints of discrimination, focus agency investigations, and identify existing pay disparities that may warrant further examination.
“We can’t deliver on the promise of equal pay unless we have the best, most comprehensive information about what people earn,” said Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez. “We expect that reporting this data will help employers to evaluate their own pay practices to prevent pay discrimination in their workplaces. The data collection also gives the Labor Department a more powerful tool to do its enforcement work, to ensure that federal contractors comply with fair pay laws and to root out discrimination where it does exist.”