Employers with 100 or more employees are going to have to start collecting data on how much they pay women and minorities and report it to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) after all.
The requirement was first imposed in a 2016 rule, and the original reporting deadline was March 2018. The Trump administration put a halt to the regulation in 2017, but a federal judge ruled Tuesday that the Administration “violated the law” in doing so, The Washington Post reported.
The rule involves a dramatic expansion of the EEO-1 reporting requirements. For years, employers with 100 or more employees and some smaller federal contractors had to report employees’ job categories according to gender and race.
The 2016 rule added salary information to that regulation in an effort to promote pay equity. Industry groups complained at the complexity and expense of the task, and the Office of Management and Budget halted the regulation, citing the Paperwork Reduction Act.
That decision was overruled by Tanya S. Chutkan, a U.S. district judge for the District of Columbia.
“Chutkan ordered the government to move forward with collecting the data, a decision that women’s rights groups hailed as a crucial step toward fighting employer discrimination of women and minorities,” according to the Post.
The EEOC has not commented on the ruling yet. The latest information on its website notes that the EEO-1 reports are due May 31, a delay of two months attributed to the government shutdown.
