Newsom just signed California pay transparency bill
protocol.com
protocol.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834753
So if you think your salary information is private, it's not private from the entity most able to abuse your salary history to suppress your wages, a new employer.
Create an account using one of your employers (old or new, it doesn't matter). If you have problems with this step, then skip to step 2 and ask the CSR for help with this.
Call the customer service at 866-222-5880 (FYI, it helps to call early in the morning when most people are asleep) Choose option 2 for "Report a problem..."
Tell the customer service rep (CSR) that you want to freeze your SSN on TWN. Verbally verify that this will keep 3rd parties from accessing the info. At this point, the CSR may try to direct you to the online form, but you need to be firm and say that you want to complete the process over the phone. If they still try to direct you to the online form, say that you will not be satisfied until the process is completed over the phone. I know this can be uncomfortable for some folks to challenge someone like this, but it's the easiest way.
At this point, the CSR will ask for personal information including your account name (created in step 1) SSN, DOB, address, email
The rep will send you a one-time code using the method of your choice (phone, text, email, mail). I chose text message. Tell them the code verbally over the phone Congrats. Your SSN is now frozen on TWN, preventing 3rd parties from access without your authority. You will receive a confirmation email Optional
8) If your CSR was friendly and helpful, ask to speak with their manager and give them a little praise. Pull a reverse-Karen
I prefer this method because it prevents you from having to mail or email any documents and you get instant confirmation and a case number to review your status. The whole process took like 10 minutes over the phone.
hmm.. what does that mean? I can be refused a loan if I forget to unfreeze before applying?
Until campaign finance law is reformed, there can be no expectation of competent legislation.
In American government, politicians must spend significant amounts of time fundraising. Most of the time, the candidate that is most successful fundraising wins their primary. The general election only involves candidates who won their primary.
So before any person gets to vote in a general election, people must vote in a primary election, and before people vote in a primary election, companies get to vote with money in the "fundraising election".
If you've ever thought our government is more responsive to money than public opinion, it's because money gets to "vote" on political candidates before anyone else does.
Here is Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig's presentation on this very idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJy8vTu66tE
Here is a related political campaign:
This is true, but the causality is far less clear.
Even without the suggested mechanism, the most popular candidate would be expected to get both the most votes and the most donations.
The research on election outcomes says that enough money is needed to make the voters aware of who the candidate is and where they stand on the issues. Beyond that, more money does very little.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-c...
The article mostly agrees with you on the topic of the general election, but as you travel down the dependency chain (general election depends on primary depends on fundraising depends on capability to run), it becomes clear that money matters more. Effectiveness of spending at the roots of the dependency tree offers disproportionate effect on the final candidate choices in the general election, a general election that is likely already pre-decided based on demographic make up of constituents.
So money's effect on the general election in many ways doesn't matter if money can decide who can even be an option in the primary, or which candidates can have their names heard before the primary.
Excerpts from the article:
> But in 2017, Bonica published a study that found, unlike in the general election, early fundraising strongly predicted who would win primary races.
> Another example of where money might matter: Determining who is capable of running for elected office to begin with. Ongoing research from Alexander Fouirnaies, professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, suggests that, as it becomes normal for campaigns to spend higher and higher amounts, fewer people run and more of those who do are independently wealthy. In other words, the arms race of unnecessary campaign spending could help to enshrine power among the well-known and privileged.
> The best time to donate is early on in the primary, Bonica said, when out-of-the-gate boosts in fundraising can play a big, causal role in deciding who makes it to the general election.
The stories this year about democrat money supporting wingnut republicans in the primaries are also in line with this.
The only way this works out is if you can privately negotiate above the published range.
Also, what is to keep employers from defining unique job categories for every role?
* these nightmare scenarios have not played out in markets where this is already the law like CO. Jobseekers aren’t naive, they flood towards good job postings and leave shady practice job offers dry.
My point is that it will now be easier to collude, as public postings can be scraped by anyone, so now collusion isn't done privately but through public signaling.
Making that data public only helps employees because.
1. Current employees can look at listings and realize if they are underpaid or overpaid.
2. New employees can skip past low wage employers (forcing them to raise their wages if they want more employees).
[1] https://radford.aon.com/products/surveys/technology-compensa...
This provides some efficiency for workers, because there are companies out there who hide ranges and then low-ball really hard, wasting everyone’s time.
There is an element of psychological warfare introduced by having companies provide hard numbers for what they are willing to pay, especially for industries where employees are less empowered than in tech. By making companies provide salary ranges, you're convincing most employees to not suggest pay that is outside of that boundary. People have a bias towards making choices that appear agreeable, even if it means choosing something like less pay. It's very profitable to convince employees suppress their own pay.
If true, how do public pay ranges affect this negatively?
Assuming your premise is correct, without the public pay range, employee would likely accept whatever number employer throws out.
With the public pay range, employee can sort job listings and eliminate employers paying at the bottom, or at least reply back with “if you do not pay me as much as businesses X, then I will go apply there”.
Also, this law is for employees to know when their market price has risen and new coworkers are earning more.
Nothing stops you from asking for X+Y when the stated rate is X. All it does is give you a free floor of X in case your original amount was less than X.
> ... and get laughed at because it's beyond a listed number they will inevitably low-ball on.
Grow a thicker skin and laugh right back at them.
This should force employers to do a better job assessing what value a position provides and advertising the salary range appropriately. Currently, they know the value, but will attempt to low-ball applicants to the extent possible.
When you buy a car or a house, do you bid the value, or do you try to low-ball and see if the seller will bite?
And that's all beside the point, because the information asymmetries in real estate markets are totally different from labor markets. This law reduces the information asymmetry to actually make labor markets more like real estate markets, in which all historical prices are public information and (in civilized jurisdictions, at least) all known relevant factors that might affect price are legally required to be disclosed.
If you've ever hired someone, you'll find out about this asymmetry.
Many people are underpaid, but are happy. Telling them they are underpaid and broadcasting it to the world is a great way to destroy that happiness.
This becomes even worst when there are non-monetary benefits to a job (e.g. you highly value working outdoors, beautiful scenery, a fantastic commute).
Laws usually do precisely the opposite of what their titles describe.
The PATRIOT act was quite possibly the most unpatriotic thing Congress could have done. The Inflation Reduction Act will increase inflation.
I wouldn't be surprised if I read this law and found that it actually criminalized sharing your salary.
Moreover, the devil is always in the details.
Who is exempted? Does this cover total compensation, or just salary?
How much burden does this place on smaller employers? More often than not, regulation like this is a tool for large businesses to strangle startups in the crib with compliance costs.
There are plenty of perfectly good reasons why people might be against it.
If I am not mistaken, salary packages for CEOs went up when that information was made public in the company's annual report because other CEOS could demand more money because the CEO of a similar company was much higher.
Because that component is usually the highest of any public employee, and thats not usually disclosed. In fact, its by far the hardest to approximate by head.
Defined benefit plans, platinum insurance plans, retirement pensions, vacations, loan forgiveness.
All that comp is anything but transparent.
> that component is usually the highest of any public employee
This is not correct for most public employees. Depending on the employee, the ratio will be broadly similar to that of a private-sector employee doing a similar job.
We don't look at companies with unlimited vacation time and assert that the vacation time is the largest part of their compensation, because it's unlimited. Similarly, we don't look at a pension in year 20, which often has less flexibility than a 401(k) and declare that the pension is somehow worth more than an equivalent 401(k) balance.
This is absolutely false.
Participation in retirement benefits is 52% in private industry vs 82% in state and local government. Medical care and benefits is 47% vs 66% and the employee share of the premium is 22% vs 14%. Life insurance participation is 56% vs 81%.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ebs2.pdf
Benefit costs are 29.5% for private industry vs 38.3% for state and local governments.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecec.pdf
The difference is larger for federal jobs.
So first, I was primarily responding to the claim that benefits are "usually the highest of any public employee," which is absolutely not the case. The insurance policies and retirement plans offered in the public sector are absolutely not more than the cash compensation of public employees. A state employee that has a gross cash compensation of $7k does not receive anything like $7k in insurance benefits monthly.
"Depending on the employee" and "broadly similar". So 69% (private) vs. 92% (state & local gov't) have access to a retirement plan. Yes, that's broadly similar. But for the context of HN readers, who will skew towards "professional and related occupations, " the gap is only 8 points. (Looking at participation doesn't make sense when evaluating jobs because it evaluates what other people do versus what is on offer.)
The calculation for medical and life insurance is similar. If you look more closely at the data, it will be obvious that the private sector numbers are dragged down by absolutely shitty jobs that don't pay well and have few benefits. In a sense, it's not reasonable to compare the pool of all private sector workers with state and local employees; the latter are dominated by "better" jobs that are better whether you have them in the public or private sector. In general, an engineering job comes with medical insurance whether that job is working for the state or Google.
The other thing that comes out of this data is that we should obviously consider making it so that private sector jobs have a higher floor of benefits so that taxpayers don't have to be the safety net. Instead of wondering why government jobs have such great benefits (they don't, really), we should wonder why so many private sector jobs are dependent on taxpayers picking up the tab for e.g. food stamps for people with full-time employment in the private sector.
(And no, I ain't an AnCap or Libertarian.)
The reality is that the tech industry is like any other industry: the percentage of IC and middle-management role workers who can successfully negotiate higher pay for a job offer is tiny. I'd guess it's less than 1%, but that's just a hunch.
The folk on HN think they are the 1%. The whole scheme depends on a majority of coworkers being under-informed & not negotiating resulting in a lower floor, hence employees greenlighting the odd negotiator. Transparency will raise the salary floor,and this is not great for self-confessed master negotiators.
What exactly does posting race and gender data accomplish exactly, specifically?
Some countries (including one that coined the term Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) ban the use of gender and race statistics in the interest of equity.
Is California a more equitable state than other states? Will this bill make it less inequitable?
Are these questions being considered.
How will existing commission-based compensation be reported, like sales and recruiting jobs?
So what does a different jurisdiction (e.g. France) have to do with a California law? I posit nothing will change, job reporting/requirements are highly dependent on jurisdiction, and companies are well versed in juggling those differences.
Depends on what the data says and who you ask.
My own assumption, based on the exclusion of many data points, is that it will be used as political ammunition for further wage laws based on personal characteristics/identity. Perhaps along with that, it will catch some abusive employers, or prompt underpaid employees to quit.
And the nature of averages being what they are, and the unfortunate impossibility of paying everybody average or better, the larger groups will need to be managed downward.
This has big "the privileged view equality as oppression" energy.
Like what? I don't really see what further laws California could have within the current EEO framework. This seems targeted at transparency and enforcement.
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...
1. Pay ranges are visible for a job. However, the ranges are very wide in some cases, almost $200k wide. What am I to learn from this if I get offered the mid point, but almost everyone else is earning the max limit? Pay ranges are useless without seeing the distribution.
2. Equity isn’t included in this (or any other govt processes) because it is not considered “guaranteed pay”. Especially in tech where equity is a big part of your compensation, it’s very hard to use this data in any meaningful way.
Markets cannot allocate resources most efficiently without market participants having knowledge of price movements.
Can you point me at the proof?
Pharmacists in the US experienced some nice pay gains in the 1990s and 2000s. This became well known and drove huge increases in the number of students pursuing the field.
The US government gives out unlimited loans to students pursuing education at “accredited” schools, so schools seeing an opportunity to cash in, helped advertise all of the amazing pay opportunities and drastically increased the costs of pharmacy school as well as opened tons of new schools.
Problem is the pay, and quality of life at work, for pharmacists started stagnating in 2010 and declining by 2012, and has not stopped. Or at least the pay to quality of life at work ratio has not stopped declining.
Now, the schools have already hired all these admins and professors that need to get paid, even though the real time pay figures have already indicated that supply of pharmacists is now outstripping demand. So what do they do? They start using old pay data, or selective pay data, or showing dollars per hour without mentioning people are only getting scheduled to work 32 hours per week.
All of this information is available on online forums such as /r/pharmacy and sdnforum, where actual pharmacists are discussing changes to the field, but that is not what the 22 year old taking out $200k+ of loans is reading. They are busy being hoodwinked by their schools.
One might ask why should the US public care? Well, now that it is well known that pharmacists pay to quality of life at work is shit, schools are experiencing drastic drops in applicants, so what did they do? They lowered standards. No entry exam, liberal grades in school, and bottom line is any smart kid avoids pharmacy school, and so the US public now has lesser qualified and overworked people to look forward to as their pharmacists.
By the way, during 2010 to 2020, while entry level pharmacist nominal pay was declining, in an economy where everyone else’s pay was increasing, BLS kept stating that pharmacy was a growth career at +10%. It was only in 2020 that BLS data caught up and said pharmacy was contracting at -3%.
So real time price information can help prevent such massive wastes of society’s resources. Now we have a few hundred thousand people saddled with enormous taxpayer funded debt, doing a shitty job because they are under the thumb of their employers. Read the forums, they openly admit CVS/Walgreens/etc force them to work at such high rates that they fear they cannot properly vet medications.
You learn not to apply to jobs with low minimum ranges, and high school students learn not to study fuels with low minimum and low high ranges.
The law is not for you, specifically to help you negotiate maximum pay from one job. For that, you need to go out and sell your labor to multiple parties and have them bid against each other.
"Useless"? Or just "not as useful as a more complete picture would be"? I agree that the latter is true, but that doesn't make them useless, IMO.
It enables third parties to calculate ESG scores more easily using data that would otherwise have to be voluntarily relinquished. The S in ESG stands for compliance with the woke social justice agenda. ESG essentially means compliance with the agenda of the powers creating the score, so coal and weapons manufactorers have a high score.
The companies can be financially pressured by pension and index funds that illegally use cartel behavior to push the incredibly unpopular ESG. Expect those pension funds assets to trend towards negative real returns as companies start prioritizing politics over sensible business decisions. E.g. blackrock, vanguard, most state and federal pension funds.
If I am a person whose demographics do not pattern-match against the prototypical C-suite exec, it lets me know which companies will make it harder or less hard for me to get paid as much as other people doing the same job. If I know up front that a company has a pattern of large variance in how they pay for a given role, I will save us all a lot of time and apply my talents elsewhere. We both achieve what we want in the end.
since excluding YOE could bias these values, I wonder if we will start seeing more granularity in job titles; Role I,II,III, Senior Role I,II,III
also even at 100 employees, is that high enough such that it won't reveal individuals' salary, and thus a privacy violation? surely the bill most cover such an obvious counterexample
To my knowledge, none. There are some laws that exist about some groups (e.g. the IRS) disclosing salary data. But there are whole data-broker businesses built around getting salaries reported to them from employers and using that data.
Employers can disclose them if they choose (but they don’t for obvious reasons) and many (most?) employees prefer to not have the world know what their salary is.
Honestly, I think we'd all be better off if corporations were required to publicly post not just salaries but all financial information. I think we should have an open books law. It would help level the playing field in all manner of negotiations, make it easier to study the economy and find out what's really going on, and would make it much, much harder to get away with corporate malfeasance. It wouldn't give any particular corporation a competitive advantage over any other because they would all have each other's information.
just like tying healthcare to an employer only really benefits the employer and not the people. (people accept jobs that they otherwise wouldn't take because "they need the insurance" etc.)
None. Incidentally your ability to communicate your salary is protected by the first amendment and various labor laws: Your employer cannot prevent you from sharing your salary information with anyone (which makes sense: it's required on a ton of forms)
https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/your-right...
Why do you consider that a privacy violation? I know in the US people are very touchy about it, but in other countries pay information is public. And pay for immigrants in the US is public as well (H1-B salary info is public). And also some companies have public salary information as well. And anyone who works for the government already has public salaries, as well as top executives at any public company.
It feels like moving towards public salary information would go a long way towards addressing pay inequality.
Pointing out (rightly) that H1B salaries are public is not a great argument; I think it's pretty lousy that we publish the salaries of individual immigrants. We should stop doing that, and publish anonymized data instead.
But at the end of the day, there's no law of the universe that any piece of information should or shouldn't be public. These are cultural norms, and fairly debated.
Because that is the culture in USA. You finding it weird is not a reason to be dismissive.
Really though, I haven't thought about this question much. I'll give it a shot:
I were going on a first date, and the woman asked me as getting-to-know-you small-talk, "What is your annual salary?" I would find this off-putting. Same if I were meeting her parents sometime later and they asked me. I'd find it strange if a neighbor asked me, or if a used car salesman asked me, etc. My default assumption, if someone asks me my salary, is to think about for what purpose would they want to know this information, as the knowledge of my salary would imply they intend to treat me differently based on my response. (So in the case of a first date, I could say a number where she responds, "That's not enough for me!" and gets up to leave. Or for a car salesman, he might say, "Oh, well, this car is usually $15,000, but for you it is $16,000.")
The only cases where I find this to be a reasonable request is when I'm applying for a loan or credit, as I think it's fair for underwriters to want to be able to calculate whether or not they think I'm good to pay them back (and, on my end, I'm expecting to receive temporarily-free money from them, so the transaction is not one-sided).
Now, I don't think that's automatically the case with a law like this, but I don't think it's not the case either!
So I have a continued expectation that my salary is Nunya. Unless someone can pose a convincing argument that it ought not be private, or if such a law would also prohibit my employer or others treating me differently with the knowledge of my salary, I will not support laws like these.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_(market)
> Transparency is important since it is one of the theoretical conditions required for a free market to be efficient
How should high schoolers know which skills to pour their time and energy into acquiring if they do not have information about which way labor prices are moving?
At a past job, they anonymized company survey data at various levels including not sharing demo breakdowns in data if a person was on a team with fewer than four members or something like that. I'd be open to a law like the one in CA with the stipulation that demo breakdown data won't be shared if it represents two or fewer employees in a group.
Market transparency is good and can be achieved to some extent without knowing an employee's exact salary.
I'll add that I've also worked with envious people who would potentially treat their coworkers in a hostile manner if they perceive some unfair imbalance in their pay, rather than seeking a new job or taking it out on an employer. For some, there is a crabs-in-a-bucket mentality.
Although I would have required including health insurance metal level and subsidy percentage and 401k match, since they are significant and easy to predict/measure components of compensation.
The demographic stuff is a waste of time and potentially harmful, in my opinion.
> I'll add that I've also worked with envious people who would potentially treat their coworkers in a hostile manner if they perceive some unfair imbalance in their pay, rather than seeking a new job or taking it out on an employer. For some, there is a crabs-in-a-bucket mentality.
I feel like this mentality would get rectified quickly. There are many jobs with publicly known disparities in pay that function properly, such as finance, tech, and government. It will be a problem initially due to having to reconfigure people’s expectations, but after that it should be fine.
And let me also throw this out there: If you own a house, the amount you paid for it and its current value are public information. In theory anyone with your address can see how much you paid for your house. If it was recent, they can probably guess your salary too. Do you think home values should be private?
In the case of both home values and salary, having it public helps everyone, because it balances the information in the marketplace (of homes and employees).
Employees win when they have more information about salaries of other people.
This is not the case in every jurisdiction. Even in my jurisdiction (where purchase price is), for my house purchase you get a small amount of indicative information about what my salary was 17.5 years ago. (Indicative only because you get the purchase price, but you don't know how much of that I financed vs paid cash for. Knowing what I made 17.5 years and 8 positions ago seems not that helpful.)
It's public for nearly anyone who matters, and private for nearly anyone who doesn't. It's public for nearly anyone who can use this information against you. It's private if you want to use it to benefit yourself.
There are really not that many reasons to hide it, unless you're lying to someone about it.
I've used knowledge of someone's salary to tilt negotiation in my favor multiple times.
But if only a few people's pay ends up being public, it will cause issues.
For h1b holders that info is mildly public: https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=google&job=software+engine...
In Washington state, all public employee salary information is not anonymous at all: https://fiscal.wa.gov/salaries.aspx
Companies already pay to get explicit salary info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834753
When companies have access to wage info, but workers don't, that creates asymmetric information in favor of businesses.
In exchange for giving up some privacy, my negotiating power, and therefore theoretically my ability to negotiate pay goes up.
I would rather have my salary public than to potentially be underpaid by several tens of thousands of dollars.
I would have ambivalent feelings about the law without this, but with this I vehemently oppose it.
If you want to maximize your own income, then you should obtain offers from competing buyers and pit them against each other.
It is fantastic for high school students and anyone looking to sell their labor can see what the going price is by sorting the bottom pay range and eliminating businesses or occupations where the bottom pay range is too low.
While it is obviously known that being a doctor pays better than flipping burgers, seeing price numbers can help project future cash flow and help people make better decisions, especially for employers offering the lowest wages.
And of course, people who are earning $17 because they were hired a few years ago do not have to go out and interview at other places to find out their employer is offering new people $18 per hour.
But I'm sure a whole niche consulting industry will be born to help large companies massage their data to look good...
To show you how this matters a lot of remote jobs were previously advertised as "not available to residents of Colorado". Why? Because Colorado had a similar pay transparency requirement. California is a much bigger fish so it's going to be much harder to do this. If you have Oregon, Washington, New York and the Northeast follow suit it'll become a de facto norm in non-disclosing states.
I fully support empowering workers.
But once this is established, it will be easier to build on it.
Leaving out "hours worked" or "Value provided" is going to create a race to the the bottom. If my salary is now capped by my peers then I may as well instead work less / less hard.
(or, i suppose, only work at companies where everyone is a workaholic)
Your taking the pessimistic view, your salary is now floored by the highest quality most value producing person the company actually wants. If that floor is low then they clearly don’t want any rockstars on the team so kick your feet up and relax. And if the floor is high you found your group of live to workers.
For the vast majority of employees, this was always the case. For my entire career the only way to get a raise commensurate with your value was to switch companies. After 6x job changes over 8 years + a 4 year stretch at the latest firm I've increased my compensation by ~10x. The most any manager was able to get me for a raise in 1 year was ~10%, and that was in a year that the standard tech salary went up by 20%.
Since it's hourly pay rates, I think "hours worked" is already factored in. I guess for salaried employees it'll be just considered 40h/w.
In a company with just over 100 people, this could mean, in some cases, it's easy to figure out the exact salary of specific people in the organization. I'm skeptical this is at all good for privacy, but I know CA govt doesn't care about this.
Some stat sheet will say “black Hispanics make $X” and it’ll be obvious to everyone working there that it maps 1:1 with Dave
is what's in the article
So it's possible that a particular combination results in a population small enough that it's easy to identify even in the greater pool of 100
Even if that’s happening, that doesn’t mean I think “oh well screw it, I’m so unhappy it’s being shared with one party that I conclude it should just be shared with everyone then…”
"Most of the debate this year around SB 1162 focused on a public shaming provision that would have published pay data reports to the public on a state website."
If that's the case, would someone need to scrape this information across job sites to get aggregate ranges for a company and/or job title?
[1] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...
If I apply for a job and am overqualified so they want to pay me more, can they do that?
2. They can create a new position at any time with a higher range and offer you that position.
Wal-Mart CEO made $1.2 million in salary last year and the rest were stock options awards. If you stay consistent, CEO salary has probably increased very little since 1965.
Either way I can't detect a causal link between c-level pay and salary disclosures. The CEO hiring market has always been quite small and I find it hard to believe that CEOs in the 1960s and 70s were getting taken advantage of and being underpaid
> nearly 10 fold as it became a public race.
Much like many forms of wealth, past a certain point it's merely vanity/competition
Doing this would enable people to negotiate more effectively, require management to actually justify their decisions and has been shown to reduce actual pay gaps where they occur.
Maybe that's too far too fast? But it is where we should be aiming.
My own opinion is that wages are completely unfair and never can be. Some people produce value several times their wage but it isn’t socially acceptable to pay someone with an important-sounding title minimum wage because of mediocre personal performance. It’s always safer to overpay your dead weight and underpay high-performers.
There is always going to be a push/pull with regulations. Considering the above statement, thinking about regulatory burdens, companies may try to work around them and, if necessary, hire people out of state to avoid reporting.
So let's forget about diversity for a second in terms of gender and race and pretend it doesn't factor into decision making at all: Companies want to hire competitively; the want the best, experienced worker for the least cost possible.
Anyone who thinks companies hire without regard to cost is living in a fantasy land and they flunked Econ 101.
So what will happen as a result of this bill? Companies will report their average wages and make it hard to find because an "average" means that some people are above it, some are below it. If everyone who see's they're "below" the average demands at least a match to the 'average', guess what!?? The average changes! Because there were people who were paid above average.
Of course, everyone should be paid fairly based on skill, but I'm sorry -- one of those skills happens to be negotiation. If we want everyone to be paid the same, we shall all be dragged downward, not upward. I, for one, don't want to be paid the average, I want a high salary -- but not so high that I'm the top paid person (because guess what happens when a company has to cut expenses?)
Another option is the employer denies the employee’s request for a raise.
So CO/NYC/WA/CA will be ~62M Americans, and if NY gets added, ~74M Americans.
I'm starting to see more and more companies listings a Colorado salary range in recent listings.
I wonder how this will work with small, remote-friendly companies hiring a CA employee and forgetting (or not knowing) to put a salary range on their job post.
What's the financial / legal consequence?
I'm not even sure how they could enforce in that case, honestly. If you're incorporated in CA, it's pretty clear you have CA state requirements to comply with.
In the former case, it seems like this would effectively cap salaries to the announced range. I’m generally quite amenable to the idea that American workers are not sufficiently protected, but I don’t understand how this doesn’t remove negotiating power, at least in the upper quartile of employees at a given firm.
Edit: confused by the downvote. Maybe point out what I’m missing?
Note that this legislation primarily covers just salary ranges. For most tech companies equity is a large component of compensation. Definitely a step in the right direction nonetheless.
- interquartile ranges
- max spread per job title
- range should be the IRS reported income, not the salary, e.g. TC.
A big reason for salary disparities in the same positions is that some people simply negotiate better.
It also does not account for more experienced candidates.
I guess it could push people towards similar salaries over time in the same position.
That’s why it smells faintly like socialism.
I assume you'd rather hire a head of sales who was good at negotiating than one who was terrible at it.
What do you mean?
Secondly, I doubt many companies will leave given that all their competitors will also have to publish this information.
I don't see this as anti-business either. If anything, it makes it easier to investigate how your competitors are paying their workers and act accordingly.
Ultimately if companies want to give a candidate more money to seal a hire they'll find a way. If they don't want to pay a candidate as much they'll either just not hire them, or offer a different role. I suspect this will be a superficial change and nothing more.
Idealism should not trump rationality; I cannot believe this actually passed into law