The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission requires all employers with 100 or more employees, and federal contractors with 50 or more employees and contracts of $50,000 or more, to provide information about the makeup of their workforce. Form EEO-1 must be filed annually to identify employees by race, ethnicity and sex, in each employer location and job category. The EEOC has revised Form EEO-1 to include the collection of pay data from employers with 100 or more employees.
The Equal Pay Act of 1963 requires that employers pay men and women in the same workplace equal pay for equal work. Even if the jobs for men and women are not identical, if they are substantially similar they require equal pay. Job content, not job title, determines whether a position is substantially similar to another position.
The new data which will be required on EEO-1 is intended to help the EEOC identify possible pay discrimination and to help employers maintain equal pay throughout their workforce.
The new EEO-1 will require employers with 100 or more employees to provide W-2 compensation for employees by 12 pay bands. Employers will also have to collect the total number of hours worked by employees in each of the 12 pay bands. The revised EEO-1 with pay data is effective for the 2017 reporting cycle. To give employers time to transition to the revised EEO-1 report, the EEO-1 deadline for 2017 will be extended to March 31, 2018.
Some business groups and lawmakers have been pushing to block the implementation of the new EEO-1 reporting. To date, the compensation reporting is still scheduled to be implemented. Employers should review their pay practices to ensure there is no discrimination among pay for equal work.
