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Comment by notinfuriated | Hacker News Reader

> Under the law, employers with 15 or more workers will be required to include pay ranges in job postings, and those with 100 or more employees or contractors will have to report median and mean hourly pay rates by job category and “each combination of race, ethnicity, and sex.”

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.

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"The black guy makes $22 per hour."

You shouldn't keep your wages secret. Your boss wants you to, because they don't want you to find out you're being underpaid.

It should be up to me whether or not I keep my wages secret (and if I don't, with whom I choose to share them).

Your employer is already sharing your salary info with "the work number", and they will sell this data to any company you apply to

Same principle applies. I oppose this and think I should be in control of that sharing.

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…”

Why? Public wage knowledge makes everyone better off, why should you get to interrupt that?

That it makes everyone better off is introduced without evidence. With evidence, I might agree. Without it, it defaults to private information for my way of thinking.

The differentiation between race and ethnicity will actually out a ton of black hispanics even in larger organizations.

I agree the race/ethnicity and other stipulations not directly related to price transparency are a waste of resources and potentially harmful for political discourse. Just letting the prices be public would have solved the other “problems” without enabling useless dialogue about nebulous classifications.

Forgive my ignorance. What are the consequences of being outed as a black hispanic?

I assume it’s a demographic that is measured on the typical set of questions but with a small proportion of the total population, making it easier to deanonymize.

I think they mean that this rare combination won’t have the anonymity granted to larger groups.

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

They really didn't put anything in the bill to make sure K>1??

> those with 100 or more employees or contractors will have to report median and mean hourly pay rates by job category and “each combination of race, ethnicity, and sex.”

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

ITT nobody actually read the bill, myself included

And this kind of thing already happens right now at my company. I can't do surveys at my company that want to collect demographic information because white woman 20s in engineering is enough to narrow down the responses to exactly two people. If I don't respond my voice won't be heard, if I do I risk retribution. Yayy...

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