Dive Brief:
- The New York City Council on Thursday voted to override Mayor Eric Adams’ veto of two pay equity laws: Int. 982-A, which will require private employers with 200 or more employees working in the city to submit annual pay data reports, and Int. 984-A, which would commission a study of the data to determine the extent to which pay disparities are based on gender and race or ethnicity, as well as public reports on certain findings.
- Int. 982-A’s requirements mirror those of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s EEO-1 Component 2, though regulators may adopt modifications such as reporting options for different gender identities. Int. 984-A would require regulators to study submitted data and make public recommendations for addressing disparities. Data contained in the reports would be published in aggregate without revealing the information of any covered employer or employee.
- A spokesperson for Adams previously told media outlet City & State New York that the mayor’s office viewed the proposals as “burdensome and unnecessary” for local employers. In a press release, Tiffany Cabán, a council member who sponsored Int. 982-A, said the bills “are about accountability and equity for New Yorkers, especially the women and people of color who have been underpaid and undervalued for generations.”
Dive Insight:
The news represents the advancement of a state- and local-level trend toward pay equity in lieu of federal government action. New York City joins the states of California and Illinois in requiring certain employers to submit pay data for collection and analysis.
Federal efforts to enact pay data collection stalled in the late 2010s when EEOC decided not to renew EEO-1 Component 2 beyond the 2017 and 2018 fiscal years. That is despite a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report which analyzed EEOC’s first swing at pay data collection and determined that the agency’s data could be viable as a tool to address pay discrimination.
An HR Dive analysis of publicly released Component 2 data from 2017 and 2018 found that the collection showed women were consistently underrepresented in the top pay bands of every industry measured by EEOC. Women also had a lower median pay band than their male counterparts within each race and ethnicity category measured.
Interest in resuming the practice briefly emerged among the commission’s Biden-era Democratic majority, but the agency ultimately never released a formal proposal to do so.
New York City has not yet released details about how it would collect the data, but employers may have some insight from EEOC’s collection. The pay data-reporting process for completing Component 2 generally involved surveying employees for their demographic information, collecting pay data using a “snapshot” pay period, overlaying the two datasets onto one another and reporting it to the collecting agency.
At the time that Int. 982-A and Int. 984-A originally passed, attorneys at Epstein Becker Green said in an article that covered employers should watch for the city to publish a standardized reporting form. The form’s publication would kickstart the one-year deadline by which employers would need to file reports.
