QUESTION
What are the suggestions to strengthen the Equal Employment Practices Commission's work on pay equity?
1:43:13
·
6 min
The council member asks the Executive Director of the Equal Employment Practices Commission for recommendations to improve the agency's efforts related to pay equity and employment practices in New York City.
- The commission is working to align its audit standards with guidance from DCAS
- Common corrective actions from audits involve designating career counselors, reviewing workforce data, and providing training on hiring practices
- The impact of AI on certain employment roles is discussed, with a suggestion to provide career counseling for affected titles
- The council member requests information on resources needed for the commission to conduct spot checks and evaluate the impact of corrective actions
Nantasha M. Williams
1:43:13
Do you have any other suggestions around how to strengthen the work that your agency is doing in relations to pay equity?
1:43:22
And just random question, do you work with Decast at all?
1:43:25
Like, is there any, like, cross sharing?
1:43:28
Like, how do you work with DECAS.
1:43:30
Yeah.
Jeanne Victor
1:43:33
So historically, the EEPC has been independent, which meant that it really functioned on its own with very little input from other agencies.
1:43:47
But since I've been in place, we have been working with DCAS.
1:43:53
Most recently, we're reviewing our audit standards with them to make sure that what Decast is telling the agencies at what I'll call the front end of the process.
1:44:05
And we're looking at the back end of the process because we're going back and making sure that things are in place.
1:44:10
We wanna make sure that what Decast is telling the agencies and what we are telling the agencies are in alignment.
1:44:18
So, yes, we are working together to make sure that they are fully aware of what the audit process looks like.
1:44:26
What we are asking agencies to produce in terms of this particular audit and that that we're all in agreement with with this standard should be.
1:44:39
I wanted to ask go back to your first part of your question because If you could just repeat that one more time so I
UNKNOWN
1:44:44
can Yeah.
Nantasha M. Williams
1:44:45
You know, I always love to get you guys on the record about, like, certain things that we could do to strengthen the work that you do.
1:44:53
To hold agencies accountable to remediate issues and or to do more to address a lot of the employment practices.
1:45:00
That are both, you know, nationally trending but also, like, very specific to New York City.
Jeanne Victor
1:45:07
I think there's plenty of room for for improvement.
1:45:11
I think there are a lot of things that we can do to make things a lot better.
1:45:16
For instance, we we wanna make sure, you know, it's my goal that agencies have 0 corrective actions.
1:45:25
I I want when I go into audit an agency, I am expecting there to be 0 corrective actions because That means their their program is in compliance and that they don't have to have corrective actions.
1:45:39
One thing I I noted is that in last year's audit, we audited 43 agencies.
1:45:46
Our top 3 audit standards where we had corrective actions, where one was designated career counselor, and we talked about that you know, as part of the discussion in the last panel, we had 13 corrective actions for designating the career council our annual workforce data review, which was another area where agencies just were not really sitting down with their agency head and their EEO officer and their HR officer to talk about the areas of underutilization.
1:46:21
And to determine what kind of plan they were going to adopt to address it.
1:46:27
We saw that lacking.
1:46:28
And then our our biggest our biggest number of corrective actions involved training for personnel involved in recruiting and hiring.
1:46:39
We want to make sure that the people that are making the decisions at the table that are interviewing the candidates that they are trained and recognized unconscious bias that they that they recognize what the process should be.
1:46:57
And we found that, you know, training was was part of a corrective action.
1:47:02
So these are things that I think that agencies can do better.
1:47:07
I think that that if I had
Nantasha M. Williams
1:47:09
Can you share the agencies, the top 3 agencies that were subject to these corrective action questions.
1:47:17
I don't have that with me, but I can reach can get that for you.
1:47:23
Okay.
1:47:23
And then you mentioned, like, a really sing topic around AI.
1:47:27
And, you know, it's definitely a very trending thing right now.
1:47:34
And so again, just wondering what specific recommendations do you have, if any, about how we can were to address that on the city level?
Jeanne Victor
1:47:46
So Mackenzie in their report was suggesting or recommending that workers be trained.
1:47:55
And, you know, one of the things that you know, we might want to focus on is not necessarily training every single person in the workforce, not necessarily looking at a career counselor for every single person in the workforce because not everybody is in that position, but I think really identifying the roles like like clerical, like, I said, caseworker during my testimony.
1:48:26
You know, there's certain roles within city government that will be impacted by AI and really focusing on those particular titles and offering career counseling to those folks because those are going those people are going to be most impacted by the changes that are coming.
Nantasha M. Williams
1:48:49
Thank you.
1:48:50
I don't think I have any other questions.
1:48:52
I'd be interested in knowing how much you think it'll cost to build out your agency to be able to do spot checks and really make sure that a lot of the remediation and corrective actions are being addressed because what is the point of auditing and providing these recommendations to not know if they're being put in place and to not be able to quantify what the impact is, if any, around whatever corrective measure is supposed to be taken up by.
1:49:23
The agency.
1:49:23
So just for future, I would love to know, like, if you had a wish list of, you know, the things that you feel like your agency really needs to do your work most robustly, what would that be, and how much would that cost.
1:49:39
So not for now, but if you can send it sooner than later.
1:49:42
Interesting.
