Help-wanted advertisements in New York will have to disclose proposed pay rates after a statewide salary transparency law goes into effect on Sunday, part of growing state and city efforts to give women and people of color a tool to advocate for equal pay for equal work.
Employers with at least four workers will be required to disclose salary ranges for any job advertised externally to the public or internally to workers interested in a promotion or transfer.
Pay transparency, supporters say, will prevent employers from offering some job candidates less or more money based on age, gender, race or other factors not related to their skills.
Advocates believe the change also could help underpaid workers realize they make less than people doing the same job.
Guaranteed employers will post ridiculous, not-at-all-helpful salary ranges to get around the law.
That’s what they did in Colorado, but it backfired because every applicant expected the high end of the range. Now they just advertise jobs that aren’t available in Colorado.
Pay transparency helps both employers and employees, but at the expense of employers who are trying to underpay their workers.
Well good. Those companies deserve to fail if their business model can’t support itself without abusing people.
I agree. But many companies are operating under the presumption that this will hurt them, even though they pay a fair wage. If your pay is competitive, you want transparency. If it isn’t, you’re running an unsustainable business.
Yeah we really need more states - or better yet the federal government - to pass these laws. For now, you’re just going to see job postings say “no applicants from New York or Colorado.”
And Washington and California.
So they just excluded 50mil americans or so, many of them in high demand fields.
Im not sure that’s going to work out for them.
At least you can quickly identify the employers with the shitty hiring practices. There are a lot of jobs out there.
And now you know who not to work for. No one fucking around with your salary before the first interview is going to be a better person come later.
I interviewed at a place a few weeks ago. I asked the recruiter what the salary band was. I told her I expected to be in the top 10-15% of that range.
“Well we don’t really like to hire someone at that high of a rate.”
Thanks for waving the red flag. Good luck to you. Talk to you never.
Then people will avoid applying, and instead apply to the similair job without a bullshit range. The problem is self correcting.
This law is already in effect in Colorado/Washington/etc. Pull up an advert for seattle jobs on indeed and you’ll see that they list a large band, but then a “likely salary” point. Its clear, easy and sets expectations well.
I doubt it. People still applied to jobs that didn’t list a salary range. It didn’t self correct.
But now there’s competition. The companies that post more realistic bands will get better people.
It’s like how minimum wage increases also help people who earn above minimum wage. The minimum standard increasing encourages better companies to do more than the minimum, because now it doesn’t put them at a disadvantage.
It’s funny how pretty much every single economist in history (well not haha funny more like they are bank shills and less accurate than horoscopes) has argued that no one benefits from minimum wages and yet real world data shows the opposite. As you pointed out all salaries go up except the very highest.
The bottom employeers pay out more. The bottom employees have more money to spend. The people slightly above the bottom have to be paid more. In turn they have more to spend. The tiny increases in labor costs only impact the people who have the most labor working for them, i.e. the super rich.
If you owned a MacDonalds and had to pay out a 50 cents an hour more for 4 people on a shift that means you lose 2 dollars an hour more per shift hour. That’s freaken nothing. To your employee that is 4 dollars a day, which works out to a grand a year assuming 250 days of employment. So here we can see even a tiny increase in the minimum wage leads to real money entering into the system for the one group that consistently demonstrates that they spend money as fast as they get it. If you want to increase economic activity pay a poor person more.
There was competition before though too, between jobs that didn’t list ranges and those that did. You could view a job that didn’t list a range as having an implicit range of something like 0-1000000. That competition didn’t drive companies to specifically list salary ranges.
This increases competition by increasing the minimum standard. It’s not complicated.
And some jobs will now show a maximum that is below a potential employee’s minimum even if the job sounded like a good fit at first.
There is good faith that the company will post estimated ranges from 25% to 75% of their true range so it’s not like it’s forcing them to give away the farm, but there also isn’t a hard rule about how close the estimate has to be.
I definitely reject jobs based on the range offered. I am not going to negotiate hard to get something at my current wage. They can deal with the worse people who accept that range.
When you apply for a job and they like you, you have the most negotiating power you will have for 2 years. A low range just shows you up front that they don’t value you and will not give you raises.
Yep, the best time to try to get what you should be getting paid is when switching jobs. Most jobs will take you for granted and give you just enough to keep you from quitting (if they like your work) and act like you should be happy for that…staying at a job too long is a great way, most of the time, to end up falling behind industry average pay.
I’m a manager in California, where this law has been in effect for a while. I’ve had prospective candidates reach out because of concerns about the salary ranges, some of whom didn’t end up applying or who bowed out afterwards. It makes my job a little tougher, but I think the transparency is good.
I’m currently applying for jobs and I don’t even bother with unreasonable ranges. I have a target salary so I won’t play games if the low end of your range is half that.
I live in Colorado and I straight up tell recruiters the rate is far too low to open a conversation.
They have been doing that, but it’s in the law (at least in CO) that that’s still a violation, so we can report companies that say shit like $30k-$500k. If they can’t demonstrate that someone in that position could feasibly make the high end, that range is still illegal.
Which is fine since it tells you so much already. If they say nothing at least it is possible it is an oversight. Someone forgot to click the right box. If they post a crazy range you know that they actively went out of their way to lie to you.
No the ranges help, you just are supposed to assume the low end if minority or woman. 🙄