A draft of the first major changes in 30 years in affirmative action regulations for federal contractors has been released. The long-awaited revisions would reduce the paperwork contractors must include in their affirmative action plans. But the rules would also require the completion of a time-consuming personnel survey.
Proposed Rule Changes
The regulations, administered by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), cover employers of 50 or more workers with federal contracts totaling at least $50,000 per year. Here’s a look at the key changes:
- Workforce analysis. Under current rules, contractors must compile an exhaustive list of job titles, arranged by pay rate and showing the number of women and minorities in each job, along with the pay and advancement path, if any, associated with each. The new regulations would permit a simpler organizational profile: only the supervisor would be identified individually by job title, sex and ethnicity, with subordinates analyzed as a group. Existing organizational charts could satisfy this requirement.
- Availability study. Here the workforce analysis is compared with the local labor pool. As the rules are currently written, eight factors are used for the comparison, including the overall ethnic and sexual composition of the local population, minority and female unemployment, and the availability of training resources locally. Under the new rules, the eight factors would be merged into two broad components: 1) external availability, meaning the percentage of minorities or women with requisite skills in the local area; and 2) internal availability, the percentage of minorities or women among those promotable, transferable and trainable within the contractor’s organization.If the availability study and workforce analysis reveal that women or ethnic minorities are significantly disadvantaged in hiring, pay or advancement, the contractor must take affirmative action to increase their representation.
- Relief for small employers. To facilitate the workforce and availability analysis by employers of 150 or fewer people, the rules would allow use of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s eight categories for their own job groups: professional, technical, sales, office, skilled, semi-skilled, unskilled and service.
Equal Opportunity Survey
Earlier this year, the OFCCP sent out an “Equal Opportunity Survey” to 7,000 nonconstruction contractors, seeking detailed information on race, sex and pay scales to identify contractors in need of compliance reviews. The new rules would make this survey part of the formal regulatory scheme. Under the proposed rules, the OFCCP expects to ask about half of all federal contractors to fill out the survey each year, so you’ll have to do one every other year. The agency estimates it will take approximately 12 hours to complete. However, Rhoma Young, principal of HR consultants Rhoma Young & Associates in Oakland, believes that the 12-hour time estimate is very low, even for experienced staff with all records readily available.
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Other Proposed Changes
The new regulations would also:
- clarify requirements for contractors with fewer than 50 employees at a particular establishment;
- provide new guidance on affirmative action goals, monitoring audit activities and details on applicant tracking;
- reduce, from 10 to 4, the number of required affirmative action plan “ingredients”;
- institute formal procedures for “glass ceiling” reviews to increase female and minority representation in corporate management.