OFCCP Announces Large Compensation Settlement

For a few years now the Federal contractor community has been struggling to get their arms around a consistent methodology for conducting compensation analyses as part of their compliance efforts. When the EEO industry looks back on the last decade there has been a lot of disagreement on the most appropriate method for collecting data and analyzing pay. Even the Department of Labor has struggled to identify a consistent strategy that would not come under heavy fire from the contractor and legal community. The OFCCP made a determined effort to implement rules and guidelines in 2006 only to find that the resulting plan was too restrictive to allow for enforcement of their own initiative, so just recently the OFCCP proposed to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to rescind those guidelines and start anew.

In the meantime, the OFCCP continues to enforce the law under Title VII and today they posted a press release showing that equal pay enforcement is very much alive.

See an excerpt from the posting and a link below.

http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/ofccp/OFCCP20110829.htm

From OFCCP Press Release June 6, 2011:

Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca agrees to pay $250,000 to settle sex discrimination lawsuit brought by US Labor Department

124 current and former female employees will share in settlement involving equal pay
PHILADELPHIA — AstraZeneca, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, will pay $250,000 to 124 women who were subjected to pay discrimination while working at the corporation's Philadelphia Business Center in Wayne, Pa. The action resolves a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Labor in May 2010 alleging that the company discriminated against female sales specialists by paying them salaries that were, on average, $1,700 less than their male counterparts.

The department's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs conducted a scheduled compliance review of the business center in 2002 and found that AstraZeneca had violated Executive Order 11246 by failing to meet its obligations as a federal contractor to ensure employees were paid fairly without regard to sex, race, color, religion and national origin. AstraZeneca holds a contract valued at more than $2 billion with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to provide pharmaceutical products to hospitals and medical centers around the country.