Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs

Right, right

... there's a lot of companies that do government contracting and have to follow OFCCP-

There you go

... guidelines, which attach a specific number of years experience to a job des- to a, um, a skill.

So there are a lot of pretty significant changes then in this final rule.

It doesn't feel like OFCCP just tweaked the program.

It really walked away from some requirements that it had been enforcing for more than a decade.

What changed from your perspective in the agency's thinking here?

The administration had less leeway in this space because the affirmative action requirements here are based on statute, not based on an executive order.

And so what the administration has done is it has, as you noted, scaled back the requirements, but hasn't eliminated them entirely.

As you read through this new rule in its final version, what strikes you then as OFCCP's theory of compliance? The law, the ADA, remains.

If they don't collect this data, how do they think that they will ensure that contractors are complying?

Today, we're going to talk about some changes and really what's left in the affirmative action world, what requirements are still in place for government contractors and subcontractors.

And of course, this is all following the big news recently that OFCCP is ending the requirement for contractors to collect disability status information from applicants and employees.

If there's one thing that I want everyone to walk away from our discussion today is the reminder that federal contractor affirmative action obligations have not disappeared.

While they have changed dramatically, there are still actions in place and requirements that contractors need to be aware of.

I'm Scott Pechaitis.

I'm a co-leader of the Government Contracts and Compliance Practice Group here at Jackson Lewis.

And today we're going to be talking about some of the changes to affirmative action planning and the requirements from OFCCP.

And I'm joined today by my dear friend and colleague, Laura Mitchell.

Over the course of your career, what's one hiring mistake you see companies making over and over again?

I don't know why this came to mind, but having been around when the OFCCP defined what an applicant was, That was a big change in the game because job descriptions, I guess they still are probably looser than they probably should be from a compliance standpoint.

But prior to that internet definition of what it took to be an applicant, you were able to go to college job fairs and just bring all the resumes back and spread them around the hiring manager desks and start scheduling people in for interviews.

then the internet definition came along.

So I went out to Washington State sight unseen and became the best compliance and EEO coordinator I could be.

I learned as much as I could about the law, about the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, the Office of Civil Rights, the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity.

And you would have thought I was an expert.

At least I presented myself that way.

And so what I realized is that higher education did not do a good job at marketing itself, even then.

It didn't do a great job at telling the story, did not do a great job at, and the word telling the story was not the word in terms that we used on that time, but really bringing people along and saying, here's the why.

So Washington State was under an FCC, Office of Federal Contract Compliance, They had had an audit, they had failed that audit, and they had to recreate some of their policies.

And they recreated because they just weren't following their own processes.