Shortly after the publication of OFCCP’s Notice of Proposed Rescission, the Center for Corporate Equality (CCE) conducted two surveys to determine the reactions of the contractor community to OFCCP’s proposal. The first survey was sent to contractors and the second was sent to compensation experts (e.g., attorneys, consultants, academicians) whose clients are or have been federal contractors. One hundred thirteen contractors and 33 “experts” responded to the two surveys. As can be seen in the following sections, it is clear that the contractor community uses the current Guidelines, does not favor the rescission of the Guidelines and Standards, and believes compliance efforts will suffer from a lack of formal guidance. In fact, these results indirectly suggest that rescission could weaken the OFCCP’s effort to eliminate the gender wage gap by making it difficult or even impossible to identify and eliminate potential discrimination.
Survey Participants-The Experts
Areas of expertise for the 33 responding experts included industrial-organizational psychology, labor economics, employment law, HR compliance, and HR statistics. The majority of experts were external consultants (54.5%) and attorneys (21.2%), internal practitioners (12.1%), academics (6.1%), and government employees (6.1%) were also represented. The experts had experience in a variety of roles including working on the defendant (81.8%) and plaintiff (30.3%) sides of litigation/audits, helping organizations proactively conduct compensation analyses (78.8%), working on behalf of an EEO agency (21.2%), and for the court as an independent expert (9.1%).
Survey Participants-The Contractors
The primary role for the majority of responding contractors was compliance (61.3%) followed by human resources (17.1%), compensation (10.8%), and legal (10.8%). The respondents represented both large employers with over 20,000 employees (41.4%) and well as smaller contractors with fewer than 1,000 employees (18.9%).
The full results of the experts' survey and the contractors' survey are now available.