Overview
Ropes & Gray’s labor and employment attorneys regularly advise federal contractors on their affirmative action obligations, and represent them in connection with audits by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP).
Our labor and employment attorneys have an exceptional record of success. Recent representations include:
- Advising a major hospital system in connection with compliance reviews conducted simultaneously on several of the system’s affiliated hospitals by the OFCCP, all of which were concluded without any findings of discrimination or substantive violation of the relevant laws and regulations.
- Successfully challenged OFCCP’s assertion of jurisdiction over a firm that had no federal contracts but was affiliated with a major teaching and research institution that was a party to several federal contracts. OFCCP’s initial view was that the two entities constituted a single employer, consequently, that the affirmative action obligations of the institution were applicable to the affiliate. We successfully persuaded them to the contrary.
- Advising a major research institution in connection with a first-time compliance review in which OFCCP was exploring pay equity concerns. We worked satisfactorily with the OFCCP to conclude the review without notice of violations in the areas of pay equity or discrimination.
- Successfully concluded a 10-year compliance review of a large institution of higher education by OFCCP with no findings of discrimination and only minor technical violations concerning data collection.
- Successfully challenged OFCCP’s proposed order to pay $8 million to female employees of a financial institution based upon a finding of systemic discrimination against women in compensation. We were able to demonstrate, in the majority of individual cases, that there were legitimate, nondiscriminatory business justifications for the disparities in pay that were identified.
