November 2013 OFCCP and Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”: Kafka Had It Right "When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed" (Fox: wait for it, wait for it) "into a monstrous vermin." NOTE: This is my last column for the Local JobNetwork™. It has been a special and dear privilege to share my thoughts about OFCCP compliance with you via t...

October 2013 What It All Means: Where Is OFCCP Taking You: Carter to Clinton to Obama Punch line: It's all about documentation, just when you have fired and transferred all of your document clerks. Weldon Rougeau, the Carter Administration OFCCP Director, forever changed OFCCP and laid the foundation bricks for the building Pat Shiu and the Obama Administration are now construc...

September 2013 When is an OFCCP "Placement Goal" a "Utilization Goal" or a "Benchmark Goal" or a "Quota"? This month's column is about the magic, majesty and meaning of words. One of my favorite books is Lewis Carroll's "Through The Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There" (and even before The Jefferson Airplane and Grace Slick immortalized it in the 1967 rock song "White Rabb...

August 2013 New OFCCP Federal Contract Compliance Manual Has Many Provocative Surprises: Head-Knocking in Audits Lies Ahead Because OFCCP has not yet released the new "Federal Contract Compliance Manual" ("FCCM") to the public even while the agency uses it to train its Compliance Officers, I thought I would devote this column to the new FCCM and report ("verbatim") some...

July 2013 The Myth of OFCCP's Debarment Authority: Another Great Urban Legend Skewered OFCCP Director Pat Shiu has garnered some flattering and critical (both) press coverage for her recent speech to the annual meeting of The National Employment Lawyer's Association (NELA), one of the country's leading trade associations for Plaintiff Employment Lawyers. (Note: NELA is not...

June 2013 IF YOU ARE USING OFCCP-REQUIRED AFFIRMATIVE ACTION PROGRAMS CORRECTLY, YOU WILL NOT FEAR THE COMING U.S. SUPREME COURT DECISION IN FISHER V. UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS The precise legal question presented in Abigail Noel Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin et al., No. 11-345 (U.S. Sup Ct, cert granted 2/21/12) is: "Whether this Court's decisions interpreting...

May 2013 The New Rules for OFCCP Onsite Audits: How Much "Cause" is "Probable" Enough? I think many readers are going to be very surprised by this column because OFCCP has recently completed a very BIG change to its audit procedures, but did not tell anyone. No News Release. No Federal Register Notice. No Webinar. Not even a "podium policy" announcement. And yet, the chan...

April 2013 HOW OFCCP COVERS HOSPITALS HERE'S THE RACK-UP AFTER THE UPMC CASE DECISION I was going to write about the provocative way OFCCP currently selects contractors and contractor establishments for audit, but the tenor and volume of calls and e-mail traffic to my desk in the last two weeks from health care clients and industry representatives have persuaded me I need...

March 2013 OFCCP's Great Compensation Discrimination Publicity Stunt of 2013: A Change without a Difference Amid great press fanfare, OFCCP reported February 26, 2013 via News Release and personal phone calls that it had released, effective February 28, 2013, the shackles the agency felt the Bush Administration had placed on the agency in 2006 and which had prevented OFCCP for the...

February 2013 OFCCP’s New Use of Publicity and Press Releases: New Sheriff, New Rules and New End Objectives First, you should know that media policy is governed by the Secretary of Labor’s Press Officer, and not by the individual agencies within the U.S. Department of Labor. So, the rules could change again with the President’s appointment of, and the Senate’s confirmation of, a...