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.
Then people will avoid applying, and instead apply to the similair job without a bullshit range. The problem is self correcting.
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. 🙄
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$17 for managers with an MBA, PhD in Economics, and 47 years experience.
must be available 24/7 & own a car i reckon
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Just like ads for retail stores: “Up to 70% off OR MORE”
Which really means fuckall.Everything any price store
Dang minimum wage in my city is $18/h
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Crazy that this isn’t the law nationwide.
Agreed but I think in time the rest will follow, certainly for remote jobs.
My company would rather uproot it’s corporate office from New York to New Jersey to avoid any kind of salary disclosure.
That’s going to be pretty funny when pretty liberal Jersey passes the same law.
Yall better get used to the south if they want to keep dodgeing this.
Three things I’ve seen:
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Employees getting “title changes” with no formal promotions.
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Finding candidates through employee referrals or word-of-mouth, therefore no formal job posting.
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“Expression of Interest” job postings, where no role is technically open or being sought to fill, but candidates can still submit resumes.
Last company I was at would bring people in on referrals, then offer them a different job and never pay out the referral because they didn’t accept the job there were initially referred for.
Magically the well dried up in a couple months and they were looking at 80% turnover in a matter of weeks. Never seen so many people quit en masse.
Did they have any kind of self-awareness as to why they had the resulting turnover? So many times I’ve been in companies where they do boneheaded moves, have the inevitable consequence, and then blame it on something else.
The industry was pharma. Specifically the opioid side. They don’t do self-awareness. And I’ll do ya one more, they have been in the headlines recently. Just do a quick search for Mallinckrodt and you’ll get the gist.
I don’t get the third. There is a company pretty close to my home that has had the same job post up for years. It is fairly specific as well. Is it some kinda weird tax or immigration scam? Like they have to pretend to be trying to find someone for a role.
It could be that, yes. I just meant that by having a general “expression of interest” post, they can say they’re not hiring, but still be building a candidate pool. Then when they need people, they can pull from it and say, “well, we’re not specifically filling a role, but you seem like you’d be a good fit here.” Nothing specifically wrong with that either, except once again, they can get away with not posting a salary.
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I’m in the job market right now and I don’t even look at ads that don’t include salary range. Sometimes if I’m annoyed enough I’ll go full Karen and email the recruiter or whoever posted the add to tell them exactly that. (And completely ignore them if they come back with a number, too late bub.)
Employers with at least four workers will be required to disclose salary ranges
I wonder why four, not three, or five? I wonder how they actually decide this number when they make these kind of laws?
Usually it’s 50, I suspect 4 is because more than 4 means 5 or more, and 5 is a commonly liked number
My country’s goods and services tax was allegedly set by one of the cabinet members reading the percentage off their wine bottle
I’m disappointed they weren’t drinking beer, glad they weren’t drinking spirits, and moderately happy it was a female cabinet member, drinking a sweet white
We ended up with 10%
#moreWomenInPolitics
Great news and congrats, New Yorkers! But really, this should just be a normal thing without a law requirement. It is in my home country and it’s one of the things I’m really missing after moving abroad. It helped me dodge the bullet, twice, when I got an offer but saw the market ranges, including ones from those companies that I applied to, be 2x+ more than what I was offered. Could’ve got those companies banned from job posting sites but didn’t bother.
They should be required to list lowest possible pay rate.
They have to provide a range. Knowing the highest is also very helpful when you’re negotiating a starting salary.
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.
I think bigger problem is pay lottery itself. And empolyer don’t want old(as in longer employed in same company) employees to know they are paid less than newly-hired.
This is why everyone needs to talk about their salary. Shatter that idiotic notion about pay rate discussions being bad, because it only benefits the assholes at the top sucking every penny they can.
In most of post-Soviet countries labour laws explicitly says workers can say their salary, working conditions and other stuff and cannot be punished for this.
This is also true in the US. Its very important
Yep. That’s why I brought up my comment. I thought for years that discussing your salary was a really bad thing, because so many people talk about how you’ll get fired for it. Imagine my surprise when I actually read through those NLRB posters in the break room…
Help wanted: widget twister. Pay range $4/hr - $12,000,000/hr
This is literally what my job is doing now… “Machinists: $16-$30/hr”
… so you’re saying it’s $16/hr.
That’s when you just see through their bullshit and don’t apply.
When you have other companies that aren’t bullshitting, and they’re also paying a higher minimum wage, the other companies pulling that shit don’t stand a chance.
My state has had a similar law for a while now and not much has changed. Companies will either mostly ignore it, or give pay ranges that are so wide that the information is meaningless… No joke, I have seen jobs posted that said the salary was from $150k to 600k. What good is that?!
Especially considering that so many jobs these days go through headhunters, you’ll get an email and rarely does it include the salary range. And it’s not like these headhunters sitting in a call-center in India who barely speak English give a shit about some new law.
Pet peeve: emails with the subject “urgent need start ASAP”. I actually called up one recruiter who sent me that and asked them why I would ever consider working for a company that plans ahead so badly.
Oh yes that is exactly what my ulcer needs. A job running a huge complex project that is turning into a clusterfuck because they didn’t want to hire an engineer until the last possible second for fear of spending a penny extra. Yes please give me this job. I want to work with people who are a bad mixture of ditzy and cheap.
I live in CA where a law like this has been in effect for a while. Almost all jobs I look at have a pretty tight pay range and has allowed me to bypass not wasting time applying for super low pay positions. Every once in a blue moon you see a company post in bad faith but that’s an anomaly not the norm and let’s me know they’re a shitty company I shouldn’t work for.
Those “headhunters” in India are nearly entirely useless anyway so I don’t even bother responding to them anymore… Especially if they aren’t going to include salary ranges.
Recruiting in general needs a fundamental overhaul. People should not be recruiting at all for positions that they themselves have zero experience in. If IT recruiters, for example, were all former IT staff then we’d have a much higher quality pool of applicants since the recruiters would actually know what to look for and what questions to ask for a change.
I have to say it’s been bad for a verrrrry long time. I’m actually surprised people try to offshore this; my experience was bad enough with local headhunters; cannot imagine how much worse it would be to have them offshored…this kind of thing should be about building human, ideally local, relationships so placements are better matches. I’ve seen very, very good headhunters in action, and all of them were local and if not working the area for a decade+ already, they were doing everything possible to build a real, human network. But the good ones are like 5% of the field, I’d say.
5% at best but I definitely agree… It’s possible for recruiters to be good and step one is being local as well as being experienced and familiar with the local companies and job market.
I’ve always compared the worst ones to having the ethics of the worst caricature of people in used car sales - a typical pattern was putting the youngest (and often quite attractive) women they could find as their front-facing people to talk to the talent, with the older men there to close the deal/maintain the relationships/do the very hard sell to the talent, etc…neither the backroom managers nor the front-facing people seemed to know or care all that much about the actual work or about your situation, etc…it was about getting to a close.
The very best operated quite differently from this. When I run across people doing it right, I am sure to take down their information and be sure I kept it somewhere for a rainy day. As for the others, they tend to come and go, I’ve noticed (sometimes just a rename/acquisition, though) but I also take down their information, but more as a blacklist/contact only if absolutely needed type of situation…
I cannot imagine trying to take an offshore group even the least bit seriously, unless my situation was very dire indeed.
No joke, I have seen jobs posted that said the salary was from $150k to 600k.
At least it wasn’t “below 600k”
This is going to be interesting as hell…I used to work for a fortune 50 and on my way out I accidentally saw the pay rates for all the people in my department.
I should have kept that document, but was afraid of legal…and that place had Satan on their pay roll.
The really interesting data points were 2 women, who weren’t particularly good at their jobs, were off the pay scale by over 100%. Like wildly over paid compared to the rest of the department. #3 was a guy who I thought was our best dev…came in at half their rate.
It would be total bedlam if they had to make that public.
Sounds like BoA
I’m sure it would be in the short term, but in the long term, I bet it would land on being a better place to work.
I can’t fathom that place ever being a good place to work…it’s old money, and they have cash reserves to keep them solvent for a century.
They have no incentive to change. They’re happy when their high value staff quit and could care less about the churn it causes.
I think this works for some job positions, and probably most.
I’m looking for an engineer right now. I’ll take a young one to train up, but I’ll also take an experienced engineer that I don’t have to do anything.
That pay range is pretty broad.
Just came to say that companies will do exactly that if the law allows.
Entry level job:
- Req 1
- Req 2
Pay: $1-500,000
and pay you the lowest number you’ll say yes to
