The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has announced that qualifying employers must submit EEO-1 Component 1 data for 2019 and 2020 starting on April 26 with a deadline of July 19.
In 2020, the commission decided to postpone collection of 2019 data to this year because of the massive disruptions to the economy that resulted from the Coronavirus pandemic.
The EEO-1, Component 1 form collects workforce data from employers with 100 or more employees and federal contractors with 50 or more employees. These employers are expected to submit demographic information about the race, gender and the ethnicity of members of their workforce, broken down by job category.
The EEOC has already begun formally notifying EEO-1 filers via email concerning the new collection dates. “Filers should begin preparing to submit data in anticipation of the April 26 opening of the data collection period,” the commission stressed.
Recognizing the continuing differential impacts of the pandemic on workplaces nationwide and the burden of having to meet the requirement to submit two years of EEO-1 data, the EEOC said it is extending the data collection period this year from 10 weeks to 12 weeks to provide employers with additional time to file.
EEO filers can visit https://EEOCdata.org for more information regarding updates on the data collection. According to the commission, when the collection period opens, more resources to assist filers with their submissions will be available online. The EEOC Filer Support Team also is supposed to be available to respond to inquiries from employers and to provide additional filling assistance.
At this point, it is not known whether the EEOC under the Biden Administration will once again seek to revive a more ambitious program designed to collect much more extensive data in another form that was called EEO-1, Component 2. The Obama era commission had imposed the new form, which later died a slow death during the time of the Trump presidency after courts became involved.
Some states have decided to follow in the federal EEOC’s footsteps. California enacted a law last year requiring private employers with 100 or more employees (with at least one employee in California) to submit an annual pay data report to the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) by March 31, 2021, and each year after that.
Employers are expected to utilize the same gender and ethnicity categories in the federal EEO-1 form, broken down over 12 different pay bands, to submit to the state. Employers also are required to report total hours worked by each employee in a given pay band during the calendar year.
The California statute mirrors the short-lived federal EEO-1, Component 2 filing that was adopted by the EEOC during the Obama Administration, note attorneys Meg Karnig, Paul Newendyke and Barry Hartstein of the law firm of Littler Mendelson. One difference is that DFEH requires employers to report employees defined as non-binary in the same manner as male and female employees are reported.
On March 23, Illinois enacted SB 1480, which codifies similar reporting requirements, but with a new twist—the information reported by employers will be made public. Employers with more than 100 employees will be expected to file reports that are substantially similar to the federal EEO-1 form starting January 1, 2023. However, the data employers file with the EEOC at the federal level is reserved for the commission’s internal use and is not made public.
The Littler Mendelson attorneys point out that SB 1480 expressly provides that “the Secretary of State shall publish the data on the gender, race and ethnicity of each corporation’s employees on the Secretary of State’s official website” within 90 days of its receipt.
