BILL NUMBER: S8960

SPONSOR: CLEARE
 
TITLE OF BILL:

An act to amend the civil service law, in relation to reporting the
race, ethnicity and salary ranges for women employed in service of the
state

 
PURPOSE OR GENERAL IDEA OF BILL:

Requires the NYS Department of Civil Service to include ethnicity and
race data in its annual report of women in state government workforce.
The data is currently omitted.

 
SUMMARY OF SPECIFIC PROVISIONS:

Section 1. Paragraphs (c) and (d) of subdivision 2 of section 12 of the
civil service law, as added by chapter 460 of the laws of 2016, are
amended to read as follows:

(c) (The the name of each office, agency, department and/or position in
              

the service of the state and the number of women employed in each such
office, agency, department and/or position;

(d) the race and ethnicity of each woman employed in each office, agen-
cy, department and/or position in the service of the state pursuant to
paragraph (c) of this subdivision; (e) the salary range for each racial
and/or ethnic group of women in each office, agency, department and/or
position in the service of the state pursuant to paragraph (d) of this
subdivision;

Section 2: This act shall take effect immediately.

 
JUSTIFICATION:

The lack of diversity in state government agencies has been well docu-
mented over the years. Past discriminatory hiring and promotion prac-
tices led to a federal court granting minority state workers class-ac-
tion status in a lawsuit that had the State pay out $40 million in
damages to plaintiffs in the early 2000's.

Efforts to improve recruitment, hiring and retention of minority work-
er's have fallen on deaf ears by the NYS Department of Civil Service. In
2016, after New York State enacted legislation requiring the agency to
publish an annual report on women in the state agency workforce. Its
first three reports alarmingly left out any and all references to
ethnicity or race of the women employed by the NYS government.

To good government organizations, the omission of this key data was not
a mistake. There are very few Latinas and Asian women working in a state
workforce of over 154,000 workers. One estimate has less than 4000 Lati-
nas employed by NYS out of the 154,000 person workforce.  Another report
documented that less than 2% of appointees to state authorities and
commissions are Asians.

This legislation will require that the future reports on women in the
state agencies workforce document their ethnicity and race 'along with

compensation data to ensure that minority women are not being subjected
to lower pay and detrimental hiring and promotion practices.

 
PRIOR LEGISLATIVE HISTORY:

New legislation

 
FISCAL IMPLICATIONS:

None.

 
EFFECTIVE DATE:
This act shall take effect