Hunton Employment & Labor Perspectives

California has enacted a number of new laws (some of these have been covered in more detail on this blog and are linked below). The following are the most significant changes that California employers can expect as we move into the new year:

A bill recently signed into law in California will require private employers to submit annual “pay data reports” to the Department of Fair Employment and Housing (“DFEH”) beginning in March 2021. The California law implements a previously announced program rolled back by the Trump administration to expand federal reporting requirements to include employee pay data by race, gender, and ethnicity.

Businesses with at least 100 employees and federal contractors with at least 50 employees must annually file an EEO-1 Private Sector Report disclosing to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission the number of women and minorities they employ by job category, race, sex and ethnicity.  Covered employers have been providing this traditional race-ethnicity and sex data (referred to as “Component 1 data”) to the Commission for over half a century.  The EEOC uses it to analyze employment patterns and support civil rights enforcement.