OFCCP Week in Review: January 22, 2018

• Patrick Pizzella for the agency’s second highest position, DOL Deputy Secretary
• Scott Mugno for DOL Assistant Secretary, Occupational Safety and Health Administration
• William Beach for Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner
• Cheryl Stanton for Wage and Hour Division Administrator

The Committee’s approval of the DOL nominees forwards the names for a full Senate floor vote. These nominees join dozens of other officials in waiting for a Senate floor vote.

All four DOL nominees are predicted to get strong Republican support in the vote.

For more details on the events leading up to these nominations, as well as additional details on the nominees, please see the OFCCP Week In Review: January 16, 2018.

Why a shutdown?

Republicans in Congress passed stop-gap funding legislation on Thursday but their colleagues in the Senate needed support from 10 Democrats for it to pass. Five voted in favor but five Republicans opposed the measure and it failed to pass.

The central dispute came over protections for undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. Democrats wanted to force through protections from deportation for 700,000 “dreamers” who had previously been covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. See John Fox’s blog, “DACA is about to be gone…” on September 11, 2017, as well as the OFCCP Week in Review: September 11, 2017 for more information on DACA.

The shutdown came on the one-year anniversary of President Trump’s inauguration as President, and as Republicans enjoy majorities in both the House and Senate.

It is noted that:

“…although [this] agency has no ongoing operations during the lapse, a senior-level employee will be excepted on an intermittent basis for the purpose of performing excepted activities that may arise during the lapse of appropriations, including, without limitation, overseeing [the] agency’s shutdown activities and the restarting of agency operations, and communicating with DOL leadership and DOL employees regarding the status of DOL operations during a lapse.”

In addition, the Plan goes on to say that the OFCCP has confirmed that “they have no functions that would continue during a funding lapse.”

Note: The Senate voted today (Monday, January 22, 2018) 81-18 to break a Democratic filibuster on a government spending bill, clearing the way for Congress to approve the stopgap measure and end the three-day government shutdown.

The Senate still has to vote on the bill itself, which the House will have to consider next. The measure would fund the government through February 8, 2018.

FBI agents, Transportation Security Administration screeners, and the Coast Guard are still on the job. Meat and poultry inspectors, air traffic controllers and members of Congress, excluding their staffs, are also still working (and likely scrambling to find a solution to ending the shutdown).

Most federal employees, which includes staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who are dealing with the flu epidemic, and staff at the Internal Revenue Service, who are dealing with the new tax law and beginning to process tax returns, remain on the job. So do national park rangers.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents are also on the job.

The Smithsonian Institution’s museums, the National Zoo, Veteran Affairs hospitals, federal courts and the U.S. Postal Service are open.

More details can be found here from NBC, here according to VOX and here as reported by the Washington Post.

For what you can and cannot do, see here.

As in the past, all private employers with 100 or more employees and federal contractors or subcontractors with at least 50 employees AND a federal contract or subcontract amounting to $50,000 or more are required to report employment data by race/ethnicity, gender and job category on the EEO-1 report.

The employment data used for the 2017 EEO-1 survey must be selected from one payroll period in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2017 (October, November or December 2017). Click here to go to the survey.

Due Date: March 31, 2018.