Long-term I suspect pay transparency laws will result in lower median salaries

It'll push towards the kind of compensation that isn't easily captured by those metrics. There is an incentive for this asymmetry to exist, and the thought that we can just outlaw it out of the way is noble but flawed with tremendous hubris. The unintended effect is that it'll now become EVEN HARDER to truly gauge overall compensation... things like bonuses, gifts-in-kind, etc., all will increase. When a co is required to put something like this out there, every internal and external stakeholder will begin seeing the number published as some lower-bound of a "fair" salary ("hey, why is the new guy getting more money than me?"), so they will be incentivized to reveal as little as possible OR to give as imprecise a number as they can.

The crux of this argument is that in the current system

> bands to end up getting adjusted as the market chases

This is some kind of typo, but I think the idea is that increasing pay for the 1% most desirable candidates ends up increasing it across the industry for everyone else, even though they aren't public.

Citation needed, I think.

It's pretty easy to construct an equally rigorous argument about why transparency will increase median salaries: employers will keep fighting over the top 1%, and this will now have a direct effect on salaries, as the author describes in an earlier tweet.

Two questions, if anyone has analyzed these laws:

1) is there any limit or audit of the ranges? In other words does it prevent an employer from posting a broad range, with a lower limit covering current employees, and is there going to be an audit that these ranges were accurate.

2) do they prevent hiring outside the range? As in, if the job post says $100K-$150K, does it prevent the employer from making an offer of $200K?

Also, companies can put things like guaranteed bonus in the offer to get around most restrictions