Expert: John Fuller - 2/6/2012

Question
I am trying to understand the difference between a site based AAP and a functional AAP in regards to external and internal employee availabilities.  With a site based AAP, census code percentages can be used for external/applicant availability by telling how many people by each protected group are available for work in the area.   For internal availabilites it is possible to look at job groups at each site and trainable employees that could possible be promoted to those job groups.  

But in doing a functional AAP and looking at function across the entire company, how do you adjust for availabilites when there are many locations?  Is this simply a weighted average of availabilities of all the locations?

Answer
Hi Shana,

You post an excellent question. First of all you have to determine if you are going to use either an establishment based or a functional AA Plan.  Are you a government contractor or are you doing an affirmative action plan for your own company's use?  The reason is that OFCCP has some set guidelines for these.  Each covered nonconstruction (supply and service) contractor must develop and maintain an affirmative action program (AAP) in accordance with 41 CFR Part 60-2. For a majority of contractors, establishment-based AAPs are developed and maintained. However, for some multi-establishment contractors that have large business or functional units such as a Sales Division or Research and Development function that span across establishments located in different states or regions, an AAP may be developed by functional or business units. These functional AAPs or FAAPs will allow the contractor to examine whether its personnel practices and affirmative action efforts are sufficient to ensure equal employment opportunity for applicants and employees of a functional or business unit, rather than a particular establishment.

All employees within the contractor's workforce must be included within an AAP. However, this does not mean that the entire workforce must be covered by functional AAPs when a contractor has a functional AAP agreement. In some cases, it may be appropriate for a contractor to use both functional AAPs and establishment-based AAPs. For example, a contractor has multi-establishments that are located in Seattle, Denver, and Washington, DC. Each of these establishments includes a Marketing unit, and Research functions. The functional AAP agreement might permit the contractor to develop and implement two functional AAPs: one for Marketing and one for Research. The remaining employees would be covered in separate establishment-based AAPs and reflected in the functional AAP agreement appendices.

To answer your question about internal availabilities, you can look at job groups at each site and factor in if there are traineable employes who could be promoted into the job groups as you would any affirmative action plan.  I would not recommend a functional plan for all of your company and would break it down to site specific; further would not adjust for availabilities at all locations due to the variances in positions and where your good faith efforts would stand up to the test.    I formerly worked as the EEO/AA Manager for a nationwide security corporation and that is how we did it with the OFCCP's blessing.  All job groupings as you know do not dictate that you pull from nationwide sources but from a reasonable recruiting distance based upon the Metropolitan zone you live in.  

If you have further questions, please feel free to follow up.

John