Featured Practice: Review Compensation Processes to Ensure Nondiscrimination

As many human resources professionals in the U.S. know by now, recent federal activity has increased employers’ compliance responsibilities. In last month’s Sightlines, we reviewed many of these changes, including the passing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the increase of resources at the EEOC and Department of Labor focused on uncovering systemic pay discrimination. Faced with this new assertiveness from the enforcement agencies, as well as the possibility of further equal pay legislation, proactive employers are auditing their compensation practices to ensure that pay patterns are nondiscriminatory. Such an audit might include the following steps:

•Assess job descriptions in terms of ADA compliance, internal consistency, descriptive accuracy, and the ability to differentiate between jobs in different functional areas and at different levels.
•Recommend solutions to ensure that the formatting and content of job descriptions, as well as the process of gathering job information, all support the goals of compliance, consistency and accuracy.
•Perform an audit of pay practices, again using the job descriptions as the basis for the assessment, to determine if there are any patterns of differentiation in pay that disparately affect employees in “protected classes” and might suggest or indicate systemic discrimination based on gender or racial status.
•Recommend processes for further analysis and/or solutions to identified problem areas.
Whether you choose to conduct such an audit in-house or turn to external partners such as ORC to help, we strongly recommend that every employer conduct such an audit. ORC is offering a complimentary one-day seminar in New York on June 30 to help U.S.-based compensation, compliance, and equality and diversity professionals learn more about the impact of recent federal action and how to protect their organizations. (See next article for more information.)

For more information on legal compliance aspects of compensation practice, contact Andy Rosen, Executive Vice President or Nita Beecher, Chair, ORC's Workplace Compliance practice.