Starting on Nov. 1, employers in New York City are required to list salary ranges in job ads. It’s another move toward equal pay, as well as helping job applicants know that they’re not wasting their time applying for a job that won’t pay enough to live on. But employers are already skirting the law in a really brazen manner.
According to the law, “employers advertising jobs in New York City must include a good faith salary range for every job, promotion, and transfer opportunity advertised,” where “good faith” means what the employer “honestly believes at the time they are listing the job advertisement that they are willing to pay the successful applicant(s).” The law applies to all businesses with four or more employees, and to job categories, including full- or part-time employees, interns, domestic workers, independent contractors, and more. It also applies to ads for remote workers if those workers might be in New York City, though it doesn’t apply to New York-based businesses applying for workers located outside the city.
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Some companies got ahead of the curve and started listing their pay ranges in job ads before the law went into effect. Others, not so much. Check out this thread:
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Does that look like “good faith”?
These companies are counting on little to no enforcement, and taking advantage of the fact that there’s no penalty for a first violation of the law, as long as it’s fixed within 30 days. The maximum penalty is $250,000, but it’s unlikely that anyone will pay that.
Colorado already has a similar law, and a range of pay transparency laws are being enacted in other states, including California, Washington, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Nevada. In response to the Colorado law, some companies started saying they wouldn't accept applicants from Colorado for remote work.
At companies where people in similar roles had been hired at significantly different salaries, the Colorado law forced some changes, talent acquisition consultant Tim Meurer told The New York Times: “H.R. was extremely busy for probably six months where they had to explain exactly why each individual person was paid what they were paid.” That was a good thing, though, because companies ultimately had “to really hold people accountable and have documented processes as to why they’re paying people, why they’re moving people’s compensation, why people are titled the way they were titled,” he said.
Along with laws that prevent employers from asking applicants what they have been paid in previous jobs, which have been enacted in many states, making salary ranges transparent at the time of application or promotion can help reduce gender and racial pay gaps. One study of the effect of such a policy on Canadian universities found that it “reduced the gender pay gap between men and women by approximately 20-40 percent.” Another study, though, found that transparency policies lowered wages overall—mostly for men. Which would also reduce the gender gap, albeit in the wrong way, and underscores how companies are willing to cut individual deals to unfairly boost the pay of some favored workers, but resist across-the-board fairness. Leveling the playing field for women and people of color is an important move—but if employers use it as an excuse to make things worse, that’s another reminder that workers need still more leverage. Say, the kind they could get from joining together in a union.
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