The EEOC held a public hearing this month on its proposal to eliminate EEO-1 workforce demographic reporting, and the testimony split sharply between employers who call the filings an unnecessary burden and researchers who say scrapping them leaves the labor market flying blind.
What happened: The Commission’s August 11 hearing addressed a proposed rule, published July 23, to rescind the EEO-1 through EEO-6 reports that require employers with 100 or more workers (and federal contractors with 50 or more) to file annual workforce data by race, ethnicity and sex across job categories. Supporters of rescission, including Rachel Morrison of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, argued the data collection itself may be unconstitutional and unnecessary for enforcing Title VII. Opponents pushed back hard: Donald Tomaskovic-Devey of UMass Amherst warned “our society will be flying blind into the future” without the reports, David Fortney of the Institute for Workplace Equality said “the data are not the problem, eliminating data does not eliminate discrimination,” and Rachel Lee of Stand with Asian Americans noted the filings document advancement patterns for Asian American workers. The public comment period runs through August 24.
Why it matters: EEO-1 data is the main dataset HR teams, researchers and plaintiffs’ attorneys alike use to benchmark workforce composition against a company’s local labor market. Its removal would not eliminate discrimination claims, but it would eliminate the aggregate evidence used to spot patterns before an individual claim is even filed.
The original insight: The rescission proposal and this hearing follow directly from the EEOC’s own move earlier this month to formally propose scrapping the reports, and the split testimony suggests the agency is unlikely to get a clean comment record to justify a fast final rule. Employers should not treat the proposal as settled: HR teams that stop maintaining EEO-1-ready data now risk a scramble if the final rule diverges from the draft, the same lesson compliance teams are relearning as regulators keep moving workplace rules that once looked stable.
