The controversial, workload-increasing changes to the U.S. EEO-1 have been ‘stayed indefinitely’.
The new ruling was announced by Randel Johnson – the VP of Labor, Immigration and Employee Benefits at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – who addressed the members of the Chamber’s Labor Relations and Employee Benefits Committee by saying:
“We have just learned that the deadline for compliance with the new EEO-1 form reporting requirement for data on hours and compensation will be stayed indefinitely. According to our sources (The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs of the office of Management and Budget) based their decision on two grounds, one of which was the appeal submitted by the Chamber that highlighted the new form’s problems with cost, utility and confidentiality. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will be publishing further details about what actions they will be taking and any future deadlines and timelines in the Federal Register. This is a victory – not just for the business community but for common sense in the world of regulations and information collection. As you know, the Chamber was at the forefront throughout the development of the revised form in crafting arguments opposing EEOC’s gross overreach in expanding the existing EEO-1 form to unmanageable proportions, without any discernible benefit. We will provide more details on this important development as they become available....”
As it has previously been reported, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was to require employers of 100 or more employees – and federal contractors with 50 or more employees – to give compensation data with their EEO-1 reports.
In addition, the EEO-1 filing deadline of September 30, 2017 was to be moved to March 31, 2018 with reports due on March 31 of every subsequent year.
Employers would continue to categorize employees, first by EEO-1 job category using EEOC’s 10 job categories and then by sex and ethnicity or race.
These have not changed but after reporting those details, employers would then categorize their employees by pay bands. The EEOC has added a total of 12 pay bands to the form – starting with $19,239 and under and ending with $208,000 and over. Employers would add up the number of employees in each pay band by sex, and ethnicity or race. Finally, the new rules require firms to report the total number of hours worked by employees in each pay band.
Victoria Lipnic, Acting Chair of the EEOC received a memorandum from the Administrator of the OIRA, Neomi Rao stating that the new form can continue to be used but only to collect the usual EEO-1 information, i.e. the number of employees by race, sex and ethnicity in each of the 10 EEO-1 categories.
