Retailers Comment on Final EEOC Wage Reporting Rule

The Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) issued the following statement reacting to a final rule on compensation reporting from The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).  

The rule requires businesses with 100 or more employees to report compensation data for ten job classifications broken down by race, ethnicity and gender. Compensation data will need to be provided for extremely broad job categories, such as professionals, technicians and sales employees, without regard for the range of job skills within each category, or in some cases, the regional differences in compensation. 

“RILA and its members strongly support equal employment opportunity and have adopted policies that prohibit discriminatory practices, including discrimination in compensation,” said Evan Armstrong, vice president for government affairs. "Unfortunately, rather than advancing the cause of equality, the proposal will instead lead to misinformed and ineffective enforcement efforts that are unlikely to root out the unlawful conduct we all oppose.” 

RILA submitted to the EEOC formal comments in April and refined comments in August.

Among the issues identified by RILA is that the proposal is unlikely to identify unlawful pay practices, because summary compensation data is a poor means for comparing differently situated individuals who may be swept into the same category, such as a retail salesperson and a real estate agent. In its comments, RILA notes that a similar data collection effort undertaken by the U.S. Department of Labor between 2000 and 2004 was ultimately discontinued when it was discovered that summary compensation data failed to identify discrimination.  

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RILA is the trade association of the world's largest and most innovative retail companies. RILA members include more than 200 retailers, product manufacturers and service suppliers, which together account for more than $1.5 trillion in annual sales, millions of American jobs and more than 100,000 stores, manufacturing facilities and distribution centers domestically and abroad.