Many companies want remote workers, except from Colorado
wsj.com
wsj.com
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.
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?
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=1751c28b-2f47...
Being able to avoid the disclosure by throwing out applications is more problematic.
The social benefits outweigh the harms.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
Colorado residents can still apply for the positions, but it's unknown if companies would actually consider them as candidates."It's a line of text to show a range,
"$95,000 to $145,000"
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.
The courts might have to work out whether state residency is a protected class or not.
- Race
- Height & Weight
- Financial Information
- Unemployed Status
- Background Checks
- Religious Affiliation Or Beliefs
- Citizenship
- Marital Status, Number Of Children
- Gender
- Disability
- Medical Questions & Examinations
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.
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.
I wish you luck making your case to the EEOC.
Since it's not targeted because of those categories not affecting exclusively those categories, it obviously wouldn't be covered.
(IANAL etc. but seems pretty clear.)
edit: more detailed explanation by fennecfoxen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27570439
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
Must have a college degree
Perhaps this category can be rescoped to include subnational citizenship.
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.
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.
<-- 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'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.
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).
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.
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…
Previous related threads:
Why Corporations Won’t Hire Remote Workers in Colorado - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27338931 - May 2021 (63 comments)
Companies excluding Coloradans from remote jobs to avoid sharing salary ranges - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27233073 - May 2021 (394 comments)
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.
(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.)
Of course we can determine some threshold below which it doesn't apply, but then there are games to be played around how jobs are grouped, etc.
I'm not saying there's no solution down that path, but I don't think it's "easy".
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
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.
Johnson & Johnson pay women 80% compared to men: https://gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk/Employer/ZQsnGdUe/2020
Johnson & Johnson Medical pay women 89% compared to men: https://gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk/Employer/QnG4UNkf/2020
CBRE pay women 64%(!) compared to men: https://gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk/Employer/CDD1g2Vb/2019
It seems that what’s dragging pay down is the fact that there is a lot more women than men in the bottom quartiles.
So I guess a solution to this problem could be to greatly increase the proportion of men in the bottom pay quartiles?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27233073 (446 points/30 days ago/395 comments)
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.