This super-short article leaves out the real issue. It's not just about disclosing salary ranges on job listings, which is easy to work around by listing wide ranges. The Colorado law has many more smaller provisions that companies need to follow for their internal operations.
The problem is that by opening the remote job to Colorado residents, the company now has to navigate the entire new Colorado employment law, not just the bit about posting salary ranges. For small employers especially, it's daunting to have to let a different state's employment laws and procedural requirements for various things infect your company's operational requirements just to advertise a remote job to a state with less than 2% of the US population.
Even the salary range listing is more of a burden than it sounds for certain jobs. When we hire for many positions, we're open to a wide range of experiences from junior employees through seasoned veterans with decades of experience. This can translate to salaries ranging from $80K to $300K. Do we just put $80-300K on the form and be done with it? Or do we have to split the job listing into separate salary ranges and experience levels? Do we have to make a separate job listing for Colorado and one for everyone else? Do we have to overhaul our other internal processes to match Colorado law just to list a job in the state, or can we wait until we hire someone from Colorado to invest that time and effort?
Then at each step I need to involve the lawyers to make sure we're not violating Colorado law in not only the listing, but now our internal business practices. We're not located in Colorado, so I either need to work with a Colorado lawyer who is familiar with the law or pay my legal team to come up to speed on Colorado law and then work with us to make sure various HR practices comply. It very quickly costs mid 5 figures or more just to post that Colorado job listing, along with countless hours of making sure we've checked all the boxes of the law. When you're a small company, it's easier to just exclude the <2% residents in Colorado and play it safe.
> the company now has to navigate the entire new Colorado employment law, not just the bit about posting salary ranges
You didn't point to anything specific except the salary listing, so it's difficult to respond, but it sounds like you're describing the exact situation of interstate remote hiring everywhere. Even big cities usually have lots of employment and tax hoops to jump through, and how many cities in the US have less than 2% of the US population?
Never really considered these as my first two employers were big enough to not care. My new exployer restricted me to being remote in any city they have an office (haven't yet seen how far this can be pushed, city vs metro area vs state). Also came across this with another company's recruiter: they were specifically expanding remote positions in Texas.
From what I've seen after research, they have to give it to you if your reporting into the California part of the company. Also if something becomes law in a significant place of the company, they often just make it a general company policy unless they really don't like the law.
We compel businesses to all kinds of speech, for instance, they have to specify what kinds of ingredients their products contain, and their nutritional value.
Regular everyday people are allowed to lie in their private lives if they wish, but try lying in an advertisement and see how it goes. There are strict rules on what you may or may not say as a business.
There's a huge difference between compelling not lying vs compelling disclosure. We do require disclosure in some cases like in the ingredient example you mention, but even the it's limited to what's necessary: companies don't have to disclose exact recipes and can hide a lot behind the "flavorings" label for example. I'm not sure if forcing disclosure in this case is good, but I do like keeping a high bar on that in general.
Businesses are not literally people. Treating a business as a legal person is sometimes convenient, but there is no reason to cling to this fiction in all circumstances.
Even if they are, is salary range disclosure "compelled speech?" Businesses, including sole traders, must disclose their revenue to tax men. They might need to disclose contact details, address, packing dates, product origin...
Just about any law can be boiled down to “compelled speech” or a restraint on speech if you twist it enough. Actions are speech. Murder is an action. Criminalizing murder is criminalizing speech.
Likewise, wearing a seatbelt is an action so requiring seatbelts is compelled speech.
And words are speech, too. So requiring car owners display their license plate is compelled speech.
In order to bring the job market closer to "perfect competition", thereby making it more efficient. One of the features of perfect competition is "perfect information":
"In economics, perfect information (sometimes referred to as "no hidden information") is a feature of perfect competition. With perfect information in a market, all consumers and producers have perfect and instantaneous knowledge of all market prices, their own utility, and own cost functions."
Posting a salary/pay range is no different than posting a job position and a location.
No plumber in Indiana wants to apply to a job that ends up being an opening for a brain surgeon in Botswana. Why should companies be able to waste time with wages that are below what applicants are looking for and only tell them after the seventh stage of interviews? It’s disproportionately advantageous for corporations.
"Major companies have said in recent job postings that Colorado residents are ineligible to apply for certain remote positions because a new state law requires businesses to disclose the expected salary or pay range for positions, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The law, which went into effect in January, is meant to help close the gender wage gap and to promote wage transparency for employees, but companies have said Coloradans need not apply to avoid disclosing the information.
Johnson & Johnson, CBRE, McKesson and Cardinal Health are among businesses that have added such caveats in recent online listings for remote positions, according to the Journal.
The big picture: Businesses have argued that the wage disclosure law is overly burdensome for employers, while the state's labor department is investigating complaints of postings excluding Coloradans.
Colorado residents can still apply for the positions, but it's unknown if companies would actually consider them as candidates."
Well, let's see. Colorado is 84% non-hispanic white, to the nation's 60% white, so yeah, there will totally be a disparate racial impact on white people. They're also 33% unaffiliated with religion, to the nation's 23%. Looks like the sex ratio is more or less identical to the national level.
That's fairly irrelevant considering it's true of any sample. Even excluding one single person has a "disparate impact" since it consists of 100% of one gender and 0% the other, etc. etc.
Since it's not targeted because of those categories not affecting exclusively those categories, it obviously wouldn't be covered.
> That's fairly irrelevant considering it's true of any sample.
Yes, that's pretty much the point I'm making. The same argument applies to all claims of disparate impact. It occurs in every sample.
> edit: more detailed explanation by fennecfoxen
That explanation does not reflect the law. (Nor does yours.) Recall that the first disparate impact case ruled it was illegal to preserve a requirement that the company had imposed prior to the civil rights act, because of the effect that requirement had on black applicants. The shift from this set of requirements:
Must be white
Must have a college degree
to this one:
Must have a college degree
constitutes illegal discrimination against blacks. Obviously no one claimed that the degree requirement was intended to keep blacks out.
Disparate impact cases revolve around the reasoning for a rule. A rule which is "reasonably designed and administered to achieve a legitimate business purpose in light of the circumstances," including its potential harm to a protected class, is legitimate. This is why an employer like a fire department, or a moving company, can have fitness qualifications, even though these have a disparate impact on the elderly, while age is a protected class.
The EEOC identifies the following criteria to help evaluate the soundness of a rule:
- The extent to which the factor is related to the employer's stated business purpose;
- The extent to which the employer defined the factor accurately and applied the factor fairly and accurately, including the extent to which managers and supervisors were given guidance or training about how to apply the factor and avoid discrimination;
- The extent to which the employer limited supervisors' discretion to assess employees subjectively, particularly where the criteria that the supervisors were asked to evaluate are known to be subject to negative stereotypes;
- The extent to which the employer assessed the adverse impact of its employment practice on the protected class; and
- The degree of the harm to individuals within the protected class, in terms of both the extent of injury and the numbers of persons adversely affected, and the extent to which the employer took steps to reduce the harm, in light of the burden of undertaking such steps.
I'd comment on applying this to Colorado but it is meaningless because there's not actually a disparate impact.
> This is why an employer like a fire department, or a moving company, can have fitness qualifications, even though these have a disparate impact on the elderly, while age is a protected class.
But note that fire departments can't have the same fitness qualifications for men and women. Age is a protected class; sex appears to be a more protected class.
As defined by US law, equal opportunity protections are only for the following classes: age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, race/color, and religion.
Programs to increase diversity at the top of the hiring funnel (e.g., outreach to universities whose students are mostly from underrepresented groups) are legal, but taking race (or gender) into account for the actual hiring decision is not.
My religion is of an open and free society. They practice said religion by passing laws that allow for data to be public, protecting what one does at home as private, etc.
I suppose if you find an employer discriminating against you based on this religion — rather than based on your state of residence or the like — then you are welcome to file an EEOC complaint.
It’s not like companies can just not open up offices in states whose laws they don’t like, no one is debating that they can’t do that. As for remote positions, it gets trickier: if the state has laws that have scope beyond the state if the company employs a resident, does the company still have a right to avoid employing in that state for positions that do not have fixed office locations? EOE just means you don’t discriminate along some protected classes, employers can still discriminate for legitimate reasons (degree status, citizenship status, work experience, criminal record, etc…).
The courts might have to work out whether state residency is a protected class or not.
Bigger companies can afford the legal departments and compliance efforts to be in line with these regs. If anything, these laws are advantageous for big companies.
I think the most underappreciated story of the last year is the humbling of Jack Ma and Alibaba by the CCP. Imagine the same thing happening to Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or heck even Mark Cuban.
In China people like Jack Ma are essentially the "white glove" of someone else or something else that have access to power if the company grows big enough.
Could you explain this in a bit more detail? Are you suggesting that there are powerful stakeholders who gain greater power outside the company through the success of the company?
In reality it's still difficult because companies need to have support from top level politicians to grow big. So essentially it's a political problem.
They are all welcome to copy and paste the above and amend the figures as necessary. I hereby forgo all rights associated with being the creator of the above line of text.
Do note that the law does not simply require a line of text to show a range, but other process changes were legislated. The one where you have to advertise positions internally (before you are permitted to advertise them externally) is probably the most likely to do burdensome things to a large company's recruiting processes.
Having worked somewhere where that is a requirement, it doesn't introduce that much of a burden. Usually if someone internal gets the position their position is then open, so whilst it requires some shuffling it isn't overly burdensome.
Real question here, how do people know whether to bother applying for a position if they don't know the pay range? Why would I put myself through a weeks long process if I thought there was a chance the pay was too low?
As an employer won't you get a really mixed bag of candidates if you don't give a number? Why would you want new grads mixed with 20 year veterans in a pile of CVs?
I interviewed recently and the recruiters all gave a number, or at least OKed that what I wanted was possible.
It’s not so much about hiding the numbers from candidates, though there’s some of that too. The main thing is desperately keeping new hire offer numbers away from existing employees.
Unless you've been seriously underpaying your existing employees, it's gonna be ballpark plus negotiation, isn't it? In any case the new guy is gonna try to make some friends over a beer, isn't he?
In many companies employees are hired at market and then given as few raises as humanly possible regardless of changes in the larger market, their own skills, or responsibilities.
Employees know this in the back of their mind, but seeing it play out with a concrete new hire is dangerous for employers.
In terms of discussions over beer, many companies successfully create taboos around comp. Larger cultures that are squeamish about talking about money, which includes many of those prevalent in the US, make that even easier for those companies.
> In terms of discussions over beer, many companies successfully create taboos around comp. Larger cultures that are squeamish about talking about money, which includes many of those prevalent in the US, make that even easier for those companies.
<-- US-based. In every salaried position I've held, discussing salary with coworkers was very taboo. At the second place I worked, on my first day on the job, the head of the department pulled me into his office before I even met with my team (aside from the two I'd met in the interview) and told me that I should be aware that "here at $COMPANY, it's against policy to openly discuss salaries with coworkers." Then he winked and said, "we wouldn't want to have to lower you to the standard rate."
I was too shocked to do anything except chuckle awkwardly, nod, and leave. I was a pretty junior dev- if my salary was above their standard rate, I feel badly for anyone who'd been there longer. Though I'm sure it was a joke to lighten the encounter, keeping salaries down by discouraging discussion about compensation is a very real thing.
I believe that’s technically illegal (under the National Labor Relations Act) so IME it’s rare for it to be that blatant. However, the message seems to get across almost everywhere. Even when executives’ comp is in public SEC filings it is seen as uncouth to talk about.
It's in the employee handbook of my previous employer. I think the people writing the handbooks just don't necessarily know what the laws are (or are willfully ignorant). I had to ask them to remove a rule prohibiting any and all alcohol possession on company premises because I said that every time we have beer in the fridge or have a work party we were all technically in violation of a rule that's very clear.
It's extremely common for companies to underpay their long term staff.
I've been at my current place for about 2 years and after my latest cost of living raise of ~5% I'm still earning 5-20% under what recruiters reach out to me with regularly. I'm on the low end of the salary scale so need at least 10% to see any noticeable difference in monthly income.
At a previous position at a very large international corp, my colleagues who had joined as graduates and now had 5 years experience with the company were being paid <1% more than the initial offer for new graduates.
This seems like a strawman. How would you even write a job description in such a way that new grads and 20-year vets would both apply to it? You have a pretty good sense from a job ad what they're looking for even before looking at the title.
The reason recruiters can give you numbers is that they get ranges from the companies, a range from you, and give you the lowest number they can (usually).
You'll find plenty of jobs where a range is given and the bottom is half the top though, so no it's not a strawman. People actually do write job ads where they are happy with a newbie or a veteran.
Because they might pay you more if they disclose upfront: Two candidates with a similar history may get two different offers because one candidate got paid more in the past than the other. And then in general, this means that over time, they get paid less too because raises are often percentages.
Disclosing upfront not only means that this practice can't really stay as is, but means that you might wind up with some folks that aren't getting paid what new hires are getting paid.
If you want to have a 20 year vet, say so in the job qualifications and offer a salary that would attract that group.
Why is this flagged as dupe and dropped from the front page? The story has developed since that Reddit thread, story in the WSJ yesterday, more data about companies, etc
Glad we got that out of the feed so we can get… books about Lisp, Amazon is a bad place to work, and everyone wants a four day workweek. Definitely haven’t discussed those before…
Given the massive data breaches in recent years - especially First American Financial, Experian, and other troves of in-depth personal financial data - how easily could the pay ranges be deduced & disclosed by any determined grey hat? At least for most of the positions at very large companies. Which I'd bet is where 90% of the benefits of the current situation (huge information asymmetries in hiring and employment relationships) lie for those organizations.
For Australian jobs on Seek some enterprising redditor wrote a script to binary search over salary for a given position.
So, you give it a job ad, and it repeatedly changes the search criteria to give you an upper and lower bound on the ad. I've never needed to use it but thought it was neat.
There is wording about the range being “reasonable” in the law IIRC. This is also to cover, for example, negotiations if the potential hire wants a higher salary and the business is willing to agree. It’s still obviously grey area, but I think making the range obviously meaningless would be shot down.
IANAL (and certainly have not read the text of the law), but "reasonable" sounds fairly easy to game in many situations. "Your honor, our job listing made things quite clear. If qualified candidates were scarce, we could go as low as 1/4 time. Or if a candidate who was highly over-qualified wanted to get a foot in the door with us, to then apply internally for a higher position when one opened up, his or her starting salary could reflect his over-qualification...".
(Note that they already seem to be getting away with the "overly burdensome" argument. The plausibility standards applied to legal arguments made on behalf of large corporations are, ah, minimal.)
Actually using a 0 to $1MM range is asking to be shot down. OTOH, "$80k-$160k, experience dependant" is probably defensible and achieves almost the same thing... especially if the range is generic for the company.
The legal system expects you to apply common sense. Do you think what you're proposing is a common sense interpretation? No. So you would not be compliant.
A lot of these come down to if you were standing in front of a judge, explaining the whole thing, would they agree with you? Or would they think you're gaming it?
I'd imagine a lawsuit from a predatory plaintiff lawyer where you'd have to prove this is "reasonable" range, while paying through the nose for legal representation anyway.
As is common HN misleads on the reason why this is happening. Publishing pay range is not key issue - those are publically available for major cos. See Glassdoor etc
The issue is the other parts of the law. Everybody for whom the position would be an upgrade has to be given an opportunity to apply first - so now when they want to post for a controller CPA position of an in house counsel job - they need to first spend time and documenting that they have their retail front line workers the advance opportunity to apply . With thousands of employee s and positions that's just one tricky situation
What's so difficult about having an internal jobs board? It seems like a fairly common thing at companies big enough to be bothered by this, and smaller companies can get by with an email of open positions.
For example, if the position goes up on Sunday and you provide the required written notice (which is regardless of qualification - so you need to take your senior in house legal counsel role and send a notice to your front line non attorney retail staff about) on Monday - you are going down and are in violation of the law because you have to provide the formal written notice on the same calendar day.
Similarly, if someone approves and posts the position at the end of a long day at 11PM, but the folks sending out the formal written notices are not awake then - bam, $10,000 penalty.
Similarly, sometimes you get an incredible candidate and decide to hire above planned range in terms of comp. This requires a re-notification to ALL your staff (ie, 10,000 emails to all your employees) to allow them to apply for this higher comp position (even if they are not at all qualified - ie, retail staff get notices for software engineer roles etc).
Finally - you have to maintain documentation in anticipation of litigation showing that you complied with the requirements. So now someone has to be logging and tracking all the various times of notice posting on a job board like indeed vs formal written notice to employees -> which then has to be fed into a records retention policy for larger employers etcetc.
For a lot of companies dealing with all this is not worth it.
A reminder - there are already tons of notices that have to be sent out. Most employers are not even following the rules here which are very specific.
Here is an example requirement for one of these "You must hand the notice directly to the employee or send it by first-class mail to the employee’s last known address. You will not meet the notification requirements by posting the notice on an employee bulletin board or sending it through office mail."
These notices are often for things like EITC etc - for some employers where starting salary if $60K+ - these notices are total noise, and insuring you send them out when required (which are all at different intervals), can't go through office mail but have to HAND DELIVER a printed notice or send via first class mail - it's just silly at some point.
This is a good first step, but just forcing companies to publish their gender pay gap is another approach. The UK does this: https://gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk/
Since apparently they employ way more women than men they should balance that first. Simply fire enough women in each income bracket to end up with an equal number of men and women. Sure a lot of people lose their jobs for no reason but hey it makes some numbers look better to some people!
This is not something where there is a market gap that needs to be addressed. If you make the risk of posting for employment higher, expect fewer people to post.
Major companies are so used to screwing employees on their wages, they'll do anything to shut people up about how much compensation is received.
Can't screw the employee out of those benefits if they're unaware that %40 of all hires received them. Can't negotiate paid time off if postings are unavailable for the range of acceptability or what's offered. Can't negotiate salary if the salary range is not posted.
Fuck these companies, and their hostile anti-Citizen agendas. We belong here, it's our country; they don't, and our country is not their plaything.
If it were up to me, I'd make it a Federal Law that any company not willing to post their wages or their wage ranges -this goes for international companies as well- they cannot trade on US Markets. That's right. No more stock market, financial industry; nada.
The problem is that by opening the remote job to Colorado residents, the company now has to navigate the entire new Colorado employment law, not just the bit about posting salary ranges. For small employers especially, it's daunting to have to let a different state's employment laws and procedural requirements for various things infect your company's operational requirements just to advertise a remote job to a state with less than 2% of the US population.
Even the salary range listing is more of a burden than it sounds for certain jobs. When we hire for many positions, we're open to a wide range of experiences from junior employees through seasoned veterans with decades of experience. This can translate to salaries ranging from $80K to $300K. Do we just put $80-300K on the form and be done with it? Or do we have to split the job listing into separate salary ranges and experience levels? Do we have to make a separate job listing for Colorado and one for everyone else? Do we have to overhaul our other internal processes to match Colorado law just to list a job in the state, or can we wait until we hire someone from Colorado to invest that time and effort?
Then at each step I need to involve the lawyers to make sure we're not violating Colorado law in not only the listing, but now our internal business practices. We're not located in Colorado, so I either need to work with a Colorado lawyer who is familiar with the law or pay my legal team to come up to speed on Colorado law and then work with us to make sure various HR practices comply. It very quickly costs mid 5 figures or more just to post that Colorado job listing, along with countless hours of making sure we've checked all the boxes of the law. When you're a small company, it's easier to just exclude the <2% residents in Colorado and play it safe.