Hacker News Reader

Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Violating the law is not a concern. You can simply put $50k/year to $1B/year and you comply with the law.

Hiring managers / business owners simply do not want sellers of labor to know the minimum they are willing to pay. Naming the minimum is a loss of negotiating position for the purchaser of labor, and that is why employers do not like the idea.

Employers also do not like the idea of having to increase their current employees' pay if market prices are rising. I know, because I have benefited greatly from paying different people different amounts simply because they do not know what I am willing to offer other employees.

View on HN

No Colorado has explicitly called out this practice as illegal. You have to be actually willing to hire someone for that role at that salary.

True, I did not notice that CO required a "good faith" range for the job. Ideally, the law would be that the employer simply has to state a range and then let the market forces dictate the ranges employers advertise. In competitive labor markets, the bottom of the range will naturally rise, and if they do not, then sellers of labor know that it is not a business worth going into.

How do they prove "willingness"? Like if you put $100K-$700K, but you just don't have any employees that are good enough for $700K, how would you prove you're nevertheless willing to hire someone (the right person) at that salary?

Also, what about the converse - what if the range is actually wider? Does anything prevent them from putting something narrower?

> Violating the law is not a concern. You can simply put $50k/year to $1B/year and you comply with the law.

Right! Which is completely useless and would just clutter the thread.

No, it is not useless. The lower bound is most of the information that sellers of labors are interested in, and that buyers of labor want to hide.

The proof is employers excluding Colorado residents from their job listings.

If buyers of labor were not going to lose anything by putting $50k/year to $1B/year, then they would be doing just that. But they correctly calculate that they would lose big time if existing employees are easily able to find out what the real time minimum market prices for labor are.

> The proof is employers excluding Colorado residents from their job listings.

FYI this happens because they don't want to risk legal action in a remote state that contains less than 1% of the workforce anyone.

Excluding CO from the job listing is the quick and easy way to ensure you don't violate Colorado law.

It really doesn't make sense to add another state's entire legal requirements to your startup unless you have to. It may seem simple, but it's actually a pain to bring in yet another legal code you have to understand and check just to do anything.

That is true, it would unnecessarily open one up to legal costs from CO, and is a good reason to exclude CO residents from job listings.

It would have been better if the CO pay disclosure laws were simpler and only came into play if applicants are bamboozled, i.e. if they apply for a job and then are offered lower than the minimum advertised.

I don't think you should use the same brush to paint giant 100,000+ employee companies and 4 person startups.

Every for profit company wants to decrease the cost of goods and labor and increase profit - or at least sucker enough money out of investors by giving the illusion of profitability whether they are a four person startup or a 100,000 person company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com