EEOC doesn’t intend to seek pay & hours data for 2019 or beyond

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) says it needs time to analyze the 2017 and 2018 data on worker pay and hours it’s currently collecting, and therefore doesn’t intend to ask for such data in future years. The agency has also come to the conclusion that it grossly underestimated the amount of time it takes for employers to gather that information. This data is reported on “Component 2” of the EEO-1 Report, which employers with 100 or more employees must submit online by September 30, 2019. Comments on the EEOC’s plans to dump Component 2 are due by November 12, 2019 (84 Fed Reg 48138, Sept. 12, 2019). As we previously reported, Component 2 has been the subject of an ongoing legal battle, and currently the EEOC is being forced by court order to collect the pay and hours data from 2017 and 2018.

The agency still sees value in Component 1 of the EEO-1 Report, which displays a snapshot of workforce numbers by race and gender, sorted into 10 job categories. The EEOC has been collecting that data for over 50 years. Among other things, it’s used by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) to identify federal contractors who are subject to compliance reviews of their affirmative action plans. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has historically approved the EEOC’s data collection efforts for the EEO-1 Report for three-year periods, so the agency needs to obtain approval again in order to collect the Component 1 data for 2019, 2020, and 2021.