Federal Contractors, OFCCP’s Corporate Scheduling Announcement Letter (CSAL) is out:  On January 20, 2023, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs published the latest Corporate Scheduling Announcement List (CSAL) for supply & service contractors, which is comprised of 500 federal contractors and subcontractors.  The CSAL is a courtesy notification to an establishment selected for a Compliance Review (Establishment Review), Corporate Management Compliance Evaluation (CMCE), or Functional Affirmative Action Program (FAAP) Review. The review will start once the establishment receives OFCCP’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) approved scheduling letter. 500 contractors are on the list, allegedly those who did not certify on the OFCCP portal.  However, it has been found that some who have are on the list.  Also, since OFCCP changed its policies in March 2022 so that Scheduling Letters may be issued immediately (as opposed to the prior policy of not issuing Scheduling Letters earlier than 45 days from the publishing of the CSAL), contractors should be on the lookout for these letters.  The good news, OFCCP has not even completed the previous list of 500 contractors for audit in 2022. If you have any questions, please reach out to ASE at [email protected].

Burned out . . . thinking about leaving the HR Profession? HR is simply too much work, said 95% of more than 1,000 HR leaders and C-suite executives in a global survey conducted for Sage, a U.K.-based provider of integrated accounting, payroll and payment systems.  Other sentiments HR professionals shared include the following: 91% said the last few years had been challenging. 84% said they regularly felt stressed. 81% said they were personally burned out. And 62% said they were considering leaving HR.  The findings are from The Changing Face of HR in 2024. Among respondents, 49% were at organizations with 50 to 249 employees, and 51% were at organizations with 250 to 1,999 employees. Respondents worked in high-skill sectors: e-commerce retail, financial services, insurance, professional services, technology, and telecommunication.  Source: SHRM 1/9/23

Pay inequality exacerbated by family leave: The policies, led by the federal Family and Medical Leave Act enacted in 1993 and other state-based programs, account for 94% of the stalling out of steady improvement that had taken place in the two preceding decades, according to economists Peter Blair, of Harvard University, and Benjamin Posmanick of St. Bonaventure University.  Economists cite other research also showing that parental leave, disproportionately taken by women, and other forms of flexible work arrangements, tend to have a negative impact on women's career trajectories and pay. Their analysis accounts for changes in the composition of the U.S. labor market, including an expansion of the low-wage service sector, where female workers are overrepresented.  "During the 1980s, the wage gap between white women and white men in the U.S. declined by approximately 1 percentage point per year," Blair and Posmanick wrote in the paper, distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research. "In the decades since, the rate of gender wage convergence has stalled to less than one-third of its previous value."  Source:  EBN 1/9/23

Income inequality is falling: Since February 2020, average hourly earnings are up 15%, but for production and nonsupervisory employees only, they are up 17%—meaning managers have lost ground to the managed. Production wages equaled 85.6% of total hourly wages in November, the highest such ratio since comparable data began in 2006.   Wages by educational achievement, a proxy for skill, show a similar reversal. From 1997 through 2017, wages of college graduates grew about half a percentage point a year faster than wages of high-school graduates, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Since early 2021, they have grown more slowly. College is still a great investment, but maybe not as great as it once was. Employers are dropping degree requirements to fill front-line vacancies, even as they trim head office positions, the sort that university graduates typically fill.  The pandemic also changed the nature of work. A lot of lower-paid jobs such as in hotels, nursing homes, restaurants, and stores can be done only in person, and the pandemic made that work riskier, more inconvenient and stressful. Remote is still desired by many.  Therefore, employers have to pay more to fill in-person positions and less to fill remote positions, which is compressing the wage gap.  Source:  Wall Street Journal 12/29/22

Hiring scams on the rise:  Employment scams using fake job opportunities to swindle applicants are on the rise and have found a new, prime target in laid-off tech workers.  These schemes—which often involve fictitious job listings, interviews with fake recruiters, and sham onboarding processes to steal job seekers’ money or identities—proliferated during the pandemic alongside virtual hiring and remote work, according to Federal Trade Commission data. Scammers now appear to be zeroing in on workers who have recently lost jobs, particularly in the tech industry, workforce experts and recent job-scam victims say.  The number of reported job scams nearly tripled to 104,000 between 2019 and 2021 and remained elevated in 2022, according to the FTC. U.S. workers lost more than $200 million from employment-related scams in 2021, up from $133 million in 2019, agency data show.  Source:  The Wall Street Journal 1/11/23