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cord.
Even if a Compliance Officer accepts an FAAP when auditing a separate establishment, is that in your best interest? For example, if your establishment has 56 employees and is included in an FAAP that covers 5,000 employees who work at establishments across the country, the Compliance Officer will review 100 times more employees for potential salary disparities and adverse employment treatment than if you had completed an establishment AAP. You will have tremendously increased potential liability by offering a huge amount of information about your organization for review!
Compensation issues are now part of any compliance evaluation. AN FAAP will expose your organization to an increased likelihood that a Compliance Officer will find alleged wages disparities. The OFCCP has taken the position that jobs in the same job group or salary grade are "equal" for purposes of wage discrimination. Although this position is virtually unsupported by courts, the OFCCP has been very successful coercing organizations into settling rather than litigating these issues. FAAPs give the OFCCP opportunities to allege corporate-wide compensation issues that affect many times the employees that individual establishment AAPs do.
Other issues involve the actual mechanics of producing an FAAP that covers employees at very different geographic locations:
Can you roll all your Engineering Professionals into one Job Group or will you need numerous Job Groups that cover each distinct geographic area? Rolling employees together may, in a Compliance Officer's opinion, "mask" underutilization at one location because another location has an abundance of women or minorities. Remember, nothing in the FAAP can limit the manner and means by which compliance evaluations will be initiated or conducted. You may find yourself rearranging Job Groups with hundreds of employees, which would affect scores of locations.
The required analysis of employment
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activity will become more complicated. If there are positions for which you recruit applicants centrally for all your locations, you can probably complete one Adverse Impact Analysis of applicant flow that covers those jobs. Even in this situation, if each location has final authority on hires, one location that hires many minorities may mask another that hires no minorities. A Compliance Officer may well require an Adverse Impact Analysis be done for each job group at each location. Almost certainly, separate Adverse Impact Analysis reports would need to be completed for promotions and terminations where each location makes their own decisions.
The FAAP will by necessity list an address, probably the corporate headquarters. Every employee not working at headquarters will need an annotation that lists where they are physically located. For many organizations, the majority of the employees in the FAAP will require annotating.
What happens if, at a particular location, some of the employees are included in an FAAP, but others are not? Regulations state that "Employees who work at an establishment where the contractor employs fewer than 50 employees, may be included under any of the following three options: In an affirmative action program which covers just that establishment; in the affirmative action program which covers the location of the personnel function which supports the establishment; or, in the affirmative action program which covers the location of the official to whom they report." CFR 60-2.1(d)(2) What would you do with a location that has 120 employees, and in which 80 employees are included in an FAAP, but the remaining 40 do not fit into the functional business unit. Must you complete a separate AAP for the 40 employees or can you roll them up into another AAP?
These are some of the questions to consider organizing an FAAP for your organization.
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