The New EEO-1

hr410

Is anyone planning to resurvey existing employees in order to comply with the new EEO-1 job classifications and ethnicity categories? If so, how do you plan on doing this? I am concerned about how to do this and how existing employees will react to us asking questions about race and ethnicity.

SFbay

We are planning to resurvey employees in July. We'll ask employees to self-identify and stress that disclosure is voluntary.  We are going to use similar language to what the EEOC provides in its EEO-1 instructions:

 
"The employer is subject to certain governmental recordkeeping and reporting
requirements for the administration of civil rights laws and regulations. In
order to comply with these laws, the employer invites employees to voluntarily
self-identify their race or ethnicity. Submission of this information is
voluntary and refusal to provide it will not subject you to any adverse
treatment. The information obtained will be kept confidential and may only be
used in accordance with the provisions of applicable laws, executive orders, and
regulations, including those that require the information to be summarized and
reported to the federal government for civil rights enforcement. When reported,
data will not identify any specific individual."

KMoore1

We are already asking applicants to self-identify, using the new EEO-1 race/ethnic classifications. For existing employees, we will do this more slowly, as records are reviewed -- we think that if the employee is told that the way in which the government asks us to report has changed, employees will not be as resistant to the reidentification process.

BKate

I guess now I'm a little confused. When we ask applicants to self-identify we use this information for our Affirmative Action plan and the categories for race/ethnicity haven't changed for this purpose--is this correct? Aren't there really two different classification schemes now so that for EEO-1 you have to use the new categories to survey existing employees?

KMoore1

Hi Kate:

It is confusing . . . we are a government contractor too, and have to report for affirmative action purposes. It's true, now there are 2 different ways of reporting -- one for the new EEO-1 Report categories, and one for reporting to the OFCCP for affirmative action purposes (using the "old" EEO-1 categories).

The OFCCP has said that they are going to change race and ethnicity categories for affirmative action reporting to make  them match the new EEO-1 Report categories, but they haven't yet . . . so for the meanwhile, we are collecting data both ways. I think there are a number of ways that you can do this, but we just ask employees to identify both ways (explaining that one way is for affirmative action purposes and one is not.) We are hoping that the OFCCP changes this QUICKLY, as it is very confusing for our employees!

 Hope this helps.