Pay Transparency: European Commission proposes measures | Hacker News Reader

Pay Transparency: European Commission proposes measures

ec.europa.eu

98 pointscocochanel45 comments

The transparency for job seekers is nice but I think the best parts of this law are those:

- Right to information for employees – Workers will have the right to request information from their employer on their individual pay level and on the average pay levels, broken down by sex, for categories of workers doing the same work or work of equal value.

- Reporting on gender pay gap – Employers with at least 250 employees must publish information on the pay gap between female and male workers in their organisation. For internal purposes, they should also provide information on the pay gap between female and male employees by categories of workers doing the same work or work of equal value.

Being able to compare your salary to the average in your company for the same job will be a real game changer.

A few years ago my company went through an exercise of making sure that everyone in a similar job made the same amount of money and females made the same amount as men. I ended up getting a $15k salary bump out of it. My company would be fine with this requirement. If every company did the same exercise then nobody would have cause to complain about it.

The problem with this is that mediocre employees getting rewarded, while the better one will seek oppprtunity else where. Over time, company practising will be less competitive and accumulating mediocre employees. I've been in HR for multiple companies over couple decades and seen these subtlely happening. Equality in pay has similar effect like communism where everybody is equal but poor whereas the poorest in competitive market is richer. It is better for a company to have intrinsic culture to always reward people for performance and not based on equality, gender and race.

Interesting observation! Reading this , I felt this happened where I work. The extra reward for going beyond the job description , role expectations was reduced and people began to work with a 'coasting' mentality. do you have any more sources - studies , papers or even blogs on this?

Myself and another employee may have the same exact title, but the other employee is doing much better and much more work due to their ability. It's not fair for me to get paid the same since I'm not doing equal work. Since the value of the work is subjective from the bosses perspective, these rules have no meaning and are easily worked around.

I fail to see your point. The law is not mandating equal pay, just transparency on the average salary for people doing the same work (which is trivial to establish in any large corporations where job descriptions are somewhat standardised). Obviously it’s not going to change much in a company where only two people do the same job but that’s not the work environment of most employees.

Many school don’t give out ranks on individual students, because this hurts feelings.

When the salary is public, most company will do equal pay to avoid hurting people feelings

I wonder how it works for positions of fame.

Actors/actresses get paid based on public demand.

Same thing with sports. Women's teams don't drive the eye balls or ad revenue, typically. Are they to be paid the same as male counterparts if part of the same org?

They aren't employed.

Sure this is a game changer.

Company will be less willing to pay differently. Depends on how good you are in the team and how good your managers evaluating performance, this can be good or bad thing.

When I was last job hunting I ruled out all ads that didn't include a salary range. That was a good filter. I may have rejected some companies that would have hired me on more than I'm on right now, but that was OK. I don't want to work for a company that writes bad job adverts.

I also used the heuristic that the top of the salary range in the advert was the absolute maximum the role would pay even if I was a perfect candidate, so I could reject any adverts where the maximum was below my minimum. Another good filter.

Then I ignored the minimum on the assumption that job adverts, and recruiters, often seem to lie and there was a chance that I might be offered a role under the apparent minimum. However, I applied my own minimum salary by taking the value 1/4 between the advertised minimum and maximum; if they offered less than that I'd reject it because it meant they weren't entirely happy with me if they were offering near the bottom of the range.

All in all this meant my job hunt was quite stress-free and enjoyable. I could easily reject adverts and offers, and when the right one came along I knew it was a good match.

Knowing that I could do this with every role in the EU is a good thing.

What about those firms that don't seem to have an advertised range, but levels.fyi says it knows the range? Does that count as a range?

Which job boards with salary ranges do you use?

I didn't use any job boards. I changed my LinkedIn status to "Open to work" and the recruiters circled like vultures around a freshly dead carcass. (Given how I felt at the end of my last role this is a fantastically accurate analogy.)

> I changed my LinkedIn status to "Open to work" and the recruiters circled like vultures around a freshly dead carcass.

Can I ask in which country that is? I did the same thing but no recruiters reach out. I feel my country is just a sw dev wasteland where careers go to die, as connections from the UK and NL reviewed my resume and had nothing but praise, so my CV is fine, and I guess the market i reside in is bad.

I'm in the UK. I also have a moderately decent network, with lots of recruiters as second order connections, from knowing some founders. I think that makes a difference.

I expected as much, the UK is still second to none when it comes to SW opportunities, especially for those without fancy degrees.

My favorite type of bullshit listings here in Norway are typically like this (and they're _always_ sales jobs for scummy companies): Do you want to earn $150000?

Then in the listing, they point out that their top earners are making $150k-$200k-$250k or whatever, but add the small, small caveat that salary ranges from something like $25k and all the way up to those 10x performer salaries.

(But luckily, a lot of job listings here already include salary ranges. The majority being gov. jobs, and the private market tends to be higher than those again.)

If pay transparency is the goal it might be better to publish each employee’s pay. That way, at least it’s possible to connect the reasons why someone is being paid more or less (like experience, or extra responsibilities, etc). Few people are excited about that, though.

I’ve set pay for engineers at several companies. In my experience, employee pay levels have a very broad range with the max and min overlapping significantly between levels, making the levels not very useful for pay analysis. This is because of 2 things:

1) “Equal work” is mostly a myth in creative jobs like software. It’s an idea that we’ve inherited from factory work where the job types were highly regimented. In software and other creative fields, if you ask two different people to solve the same problem you’re likely to get two very different solutions. Across hundreds of people, the best solution might be 10x better than the average. That’s a big difference, and not like factory work at all. If someone is doing 5x-10x better work, and your company can make use of the surplus, should that person be more highly payed? What if your competitor is willing to pay more than you are currently paying her? Would you match? And what if matching would push up the top of the pay band?

2) Usually, the goal is to match the market pay (although this is sometimes laundered through various levels of abstractions like years of experience, degrees, etc). Levels can rarely be made detailed enough to model the full complexity of the market. Let’s say you have two mid-level engineers with 5 years of experience and similar work histories. One builds web UI and another is a security engineer. These two people are in very different markets. Security expertise is hard to hire right now (and has been for the last 10 years) and therefore pays 1.3x - 2x. But your company only has one level for “mid-level engineer.” You have the option of underpaying the security engineer, and thus expecting to lose them to another company willing to pay market rate, or pay them market rate yourself but have pay levels with enormous ranges.

We need that in the US as well. I'd also like to see sub-contracting banned.

There's no good reason other than me being taken advantage of, that there's 2-4 layers of middlemen eating my lunch when I'm the one doing the work. It should be mandated that "finders fees" are the only acceptable payment for middlemen, and I can only be paid directly by the origin employer. Enforcing this view on my own without a law, or the power of collective bargaining, is nearly impossible.

I understand this is how money is usually made, and many here are likely wealthy by taking advantage of this, but it is misaligning incentives.

The person hiring the sub contracting; do they take on the liability?

What do you mean by this? Speaking for the US, there generally is no liability for incompetence.

You could prove malicious intent which would be criminal, but typically employers don't hold any real liability as long as they fulfill the project contract. Minor disagreements on the final product are hard if not impossible to hammer out in the legal system. Otherwise, the originator of the work would have free work done forever after based on excuses. People generally find companies or independent contractors where they like their work, and stick with them, and move on from those they are not happy with.

For the middle layers, they take nothing but money out of your check. For the endpoint subcontractor that hires the actual worker, he would hold some responsibility to manage the project, but I wouldn't term that as liability in the sense that it's normally used- legally. As far as the responsibility to deliver according to requirements? That's actually nearly entirely on me. That's where the pressure ends up being.

I'm personally about 4 layers deep as far as separation from the originator of my project. 2 of those offer no actual value at all other than ill-gotten gains for themselves.

Sometimes I feel like being a middle man is the most abundant type of job we have.

One day there will be just machines, middle men, and bureaucrats. :(

For all its faults. There's some shining pieces of laws the EU has passed.

Shining example of a cookie law... Welcome to wide-as-hell salary ranges. And abusing sex-based salary details by extrapolating edge cases on the whole population for media outcry.

"1€ - 1,000,000€" is a range, right?

The important information is the bottom number. It is useful information for labor sellers to know what type of labor is and is not in demand.

If an occupation or employer advertises $1 as the lower range, then it better allocates labor resources away from that occupation or employer.

In practice, employers try to advertise themselves as high paying, to actually get some decent people. Even basic good stores like to have decent employees.

In most cases, the lowest number will be just below the pay of the worst candidate they are ready to hire and the highest number is the budget for the position. And they will offer you something in between.

Candidates will anchor on the top number, so you want it to be reasonably accurate.

Also, if most companies give a reasonable range, a company that says "1€ - 1,000,000€" immediately labels itself as a company you don't want to deal with.

Flagged as title is significantly incorrect. It’s a proposal

That's right. We've changed it now. Submitted title was "European Union to require all job postings to show a salary range".

Submitters: please don't do that - the site guidelines ask you to use the original title unless it is misleading or linkbait.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Even if this gets approved, it still requires all the member states to change their laws.

Luckily for me, I already live in one of EU members that have such law in place. Allows me to discard job postings under my salary range.

Some job postings still have x - 5x ranges, but knowing the industry salaries, depending on how component the person is, I believe that it's actually the true range.

> Next steps

> Today's proposal will now go to the European Parliament and the Council for approval. Once adopted, Member States will have two years to transpose the Directive into national law and communicate the relevant texts to the Commission.

Seems like member states have 2 years to implement it, not sure what happens if they don't.

The EU can take them to court. But most of the time the process is fairly automatic and member states just do it (they may be a little late occasionally)

This should actually help companies too. If you find someone who thought you were paying 100 but you only pay 70, they're going to have wasted your time and their time doing interviews. Nobody wants to lead with "how much do you pay" so if the job doesn't say there's a degree of time wastage required.

How about doing something about the multiple between lowest and highest values in range? For instance putting their range in a regulator website and allowing them to be viewed by the job-seeker according to their own formula, weighting the multiple along with the range values?

Do they need to obey their salary ranges? If its a range, one group may negotiate a higher spot in that range still. To get equal outcome in pay, firms will have to disallow negotiation which would keep high achievers out.

That’s amazing news. I guess we will see more EU jobs going through recruiters and their “competitive salary” line.

Once disclosing salary is the standard, any role that doesn't immediately becomes a lot less attractive.

Right now, almost no recruiter mentions a salary when contacting me, so I have to play the stupid game (usually in the form of a very polite "salary number or gtfo"). Once half of them do, it becomes easy to just ignore the other half completely.

Wouldn't this just make everyone post ridiculous ranges for job postings?

Salary range: 100 to 10,000,000 EUR

Finally some good news

Nice

If the gender pay gap is more a result of evil men, and not from factors generally distributed in a bi-modal way between men and women, then legislation like this will not solve the root problem, and simply a different evil result will be revealed.

If it (the pay gap) has more to just do with differences between men and women and their choices, then this legislation might do more harm than good.

I still like the idea of showing a salary range, but it doesn’t seem like showing the gender pay gap will do much. I guess it will be used to shame them and they will give a pay bump to a woman who may or may not have deserved it?

But if there is systemic bias it will still exist and just be pushed elsewhere.

I more believe that if there is wrong the first course of action is for you to do right, and if enough people do right you have the influence to make the wrong illegal, at which point it doesn’t matter cuz more of you just want what is right.

Ultimately this is just another way to stoke the flames of class division. The idea that ; The strong will only ever oppress the weak, so the weak must always try to destroy what is strong. This thinking never allows for the chance that someone can be powerful and good and on the side of the weak.

> If it (the pay gap) has more to just do with differences between men and women and their choices, then this legislation might do more harm than good.

Even if that was true, them having more information would enable them to make better choices.

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