Key Anti-Discrimination Tool on Cutting Block
Feature Story by civilrights.org staff - 2/17/2006
A data collection tool that civil rights groups say was never used as it was intended is slated for elimination by the Department of Labor (DOL).The tool in question is the Equal Opportunity (EO) Survey, which collects information on federal contractors' affirmative action programs, hiring procedures, and compensation and is designed to detect discrimination against minorities and women.
The Department's move is "another step backward in a long and shameful record of retreat... by the Department of Labor, and the Administration," said Jocelyn Samuels, vice president of the National Women's Law Center (NWLC), in a joint statement with the National Partnership for Women and Families.
The EO Survey was developed in 2000 at the urging of civil rights groups. It was to be completed every two years by 50,000 of 100,000 federal contractors, according to a Chicago Sun-Times article.
However, the survey was distributed much less widely than was intended - to only 10,000 employers in 2003 and 2004, according to DOL.
Relying on a 2005 study it commissioned, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), the division of the DOL responsible for administering the survey, claims it "did not provide sufficiently useful data" and duplicates information gathered in other ways.
Civil rights groups assert that the study was skewed toward "good" contractors. Any employer who did not respond, submitted incomplete information, or refused to comply was excluded from the study, creating an unbalanced picture of contractors' compliance with civil rights laws.
"If the OFCCP had acted like the civil rights enforcement agency that it is supposed to be and sent out the 50,000 surveys as required, we might have had different results," said Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR).
"Clearly, the OFCCP's study cannot be used as a real measure of the survey's utility. Any assertion that it can should be viewed with skepticism," Henderson said.
Many civil rights groups, including the NWLC, the National Partnership, and Women Employed, say the compensation data that the survey collects is crucial to effective civil rights enforcement.
The Department of Labor is "discarding an important tool that would have provided hard data on pay and job practices," said Jocelyn Frye, National Partnership General Counsel. "The agency is sending the wrong message about its commitment to addressing the important issue of pay discrimination."
This isn't the first time the OFCCP has come under fire from civil rights groups. Last summer, the agency granted exemptions from Affirmative Action Program (AAP) requirements for new federal contracts handling Hurricane Katrina relief--a move that LCCR's Henderson called "totally unnecessary" and "doubly shameful."
The OFCCP is developing an alternative to the EO Survey called the Federal Contractor Selection System, which will rely on data gathered from Employer Information Reports (EEO-1s) and previous OFCCP evaluations to select 2,000-4,000 contractors for compliance investigations. This new system has not been tested for its effectiveness, according to the OFCCP website.
Comments on the OFCCP's proposal to eliminate the EO Survey are due March 21.
