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.
This law isn't about helping companies by making your salary history available to them. It is about helping job seekers by making the salary range of the job public, so you know how much to expect and ask for.
I've read GP comment three times now and I don't get that meaning at all. Either they did a really bad job, or (more likely) that's not what they were trying to convey.
I personally understood GP comment as vindicating in favor of the law by implicitly trying to preempt those who might argue that this used to be (and should remain) private information. The counterargument it makes is that it isn't private and that the information asymmetry creates a power imbalance that would be curbed by this law.
My interpretation may be wrong though, English is not my native language.
As much as I understand why people would want this, I'm not sure that I do. It's bad enough that wages are stagnant, but now we're making it more difficult for people to effectively sell their desired pay to prospective employers? A big reason why my pay increased substantially is not because of bonuses or loyalty but because I asked new employers for way more than what I was paid before, and this worked in part because their job posting didn't include a salary range, thereby not leading to a situation where I ask for what I think my time is worth and get laughed at because it's beyond a listed number they will inevitably low-ball on.
> A big reason why my pay increased substantially is not because of bonuses or loyalty but because I asked new employers for way more than what I was paid before, and this worked in part because their job posting didn't include a salary range, thereby not leading to a situation where I ask for what I think my time is worth ...
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.
Yeah, nowadays the first thing I talk about with a recruiter is "I'm only interested in jobs that can pay 250k+ for remote work, more for in-person" so I don't waste my or their time if they think $100k is a possibility
I'm not dead-set on big bucks like I see on levels (though I wouldn't turn them down). I'd just like to have the same confidence in my skillset/field that you seem to. Most of my beginning experience in the programming field has been webdev and mobile which seems like a fad-juggling act more than a 'be good at your thing and lean on it' act. I assume you mostly write C/C++?
Not all industries are in such a high growth mode as tech was in the recent past.
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.
> This provides some efficiency for workers, because there are companies out there who hide ranges and then low-ball really hard
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.
> People have a bias towards making choices that appear agreeable, even if it means choosing something like less 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.
People who earn a lot discuss their salary more, so without public ranges your perception will be biased towards the higher end so likely you'll ask for more.
I don't see how this changes anything. At every non-tech job I've ever had there was no salary negotiation, I either took what was offered or I didn't get the job.
The law doesn't appear to prevent negotiating a range higher than advertised. Nor does it prevent the employer from posting a large range.
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 I bought my house in a major US metro, any attempt to low-ball the seller simply meant your offer would go immediately in the trash in favor of one of the dozens of asking-plus bids, and continued attempts to do it was a surefire way to extend the unpleasantness of house hunting. And house prices in my city are up 20% since 2020, so I don't think the situation has become more amenable to low-ballers.
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.
Indeed, I've hired many people. The nice thing is that as an employer in most of the US, you can just fire them for any reason or none at all. I don't think the possibility of doing multiple interviews only to discover that the candidate you've had ample opportunity to question is actually a complete incompetent justifies underpaying/attempting to underpay the rest of your, presumably competent, employees. I promise you, if you stop structuring compensation with the assumption that your employees are worthless, you'll stop getting so many incompetent or recalcitrant employees.
I'm fairly certain the CO law prevents just listing a massive pay range. If the CA law doesn't have some similar protection then it's highly likely to be used as a loophole.
* they’ve already been prosecuted for doing this with the current opaque salary system
* 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.
> * they’ve already been prosecuted for doing this with the current opaque salary system
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.
It was always easy to collude. Any company of a significant size (100+ employees) is hiring consultants to determine market rates for employees. Here's the one mine uses [1]
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).
That is not collusion, that is just a market where supply of labor drastically outnumbers demand for labor. Indicating to suppliers of labor to supply their labor to different buyers.
How to freeze your work number (copied from reddit):
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.
Yes. This nearly happened to my spouse and I. It was such a pain in the ass. We froze our accounts after the Equifax breach. For some reason, I was able to unfreeze mine quickly and easily over the web, but for hers, they refused to do it over the web and insisted on using postal mail. Meanwhile the loan officer was telling us that if we couldn't get it unfrozen, they couldn't guarantee the rate they gave us and the loan could fall through. I forget exactly what happened, but once we received the letter in the mail we were able to call and get it lifted just before the time limit on the loan ran out. I would not want to go through that again. It's a terrible system.
Many states have salary history bans to mitigate this. It doesn't prevent Equifax from doing other things with your salary history but it isn't a factor in seeking employment if you are served by competent legislators.
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:
> Most of the time, the candidate that is most successful fundraising wins their primary
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.
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.
Salary history bans preclude the employer from asking you and your current/former employer about your salary. It doesn't stop them from asking Equifax.
There are several firms that exist that provide income and net worth as a service. For example, Windfall Data scrapes all publicly available information and other sources to collect data for everyone in the US. They provide an API that allows you to see the estimate net worth and annual income of anyone. You don’t have any privacy when it comes to income.
I'm slightly irritated at how many people have no problem with the salaries of every public employee in the state being public information, from groundskeepers to teachers, to head coaches, yet want to keep their own pay private. Many of us have lived with our salaries being public information for years. It's fine, it's not a big deal. In my experience, it does increase equality in compensation, and that's a good thing.
You don't see the difference between salaries paid by taxpayers vs salaries paid by private companies? Why is equality in compensation good? Do you also think that all actors or chess players should be paid approximately the same?
Listen. If you support capitalism, you should support transparent wage information, or you implicitly disagree with Hayek's fundamental finding about markets as information processors. The markets can't process information they don't have, which makes our system something which we call capitalism, but which isn't capitalism. Kinda like we call what we should call A catenet THE Internet, despite it not deserving that name because the ARPANET people fucked up and lost a layer.
Are you including all benefits in that disclosure?
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.
I have not worked for government, but I have looked at government job postings. And their benefit plans, vacation, etc. are surprisingly well-documented.
> 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 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.
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%.
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.
A lot of HN visitors think they're master salary/compensation negotiators, and fear this will hurt their endeavors to pull one over on their next employer.
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.
> 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.
> It's interesting how many people in the comments are against more transparency.
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.
There's a sense that pay transparency will increase competition for lucrative roles and decrease overall comp (but perhaps increase average comp). A lot of people think they have it good and it'll be worse when there's pay transparency (even though this is not true transparency, it's simply public pay bands for listed roles).
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.
"What exactly does posting race and gender data accomplish exactly, specifically?"
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.
>will be used as political ammunition for further wage laws based on personal characteristics/identity
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.
In California they tried to add an amendment to allow race-based preferential treatment for the UCs (etc) [1]. It failed, but just putting this out there to better understand the milieu and how it _could_ be used.
In this case, "preferential treatment" means affirmative action, something that is done everywhere else in America. No one was proposing quotas or something like that, which are federally illegal.
I imagine there will be pressure to ensure that each of those categories, and especially combinations of those, will not be paid at least average.
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.
I love the inherent contradiction that the majority who enjoys higher pay for the same work is actually the oppressed class in this situation. If shining a light on the pay discrepancy between race and gender causes pay to go down then that's pretty damning.
This has big "the privileged view equality as oppression" energy.
This is exactly what is happening right now in Colorado.
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.
> 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.
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.
The bill requires companies of a certain size (100+ employees or contractors) to publish the median and mean for each category, across race, ethnicity, and sex. It's not the complete distribution, and the numbers can probably be fudged with clever identification of what a "category" is, but it's something. Knowing the median and mean can show just how skewed the distribution is.
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.
I don't agree with GP but it can be worse by misleading people that don't know how compensation structures work at certain companies. They might be happy that they got 90th percentile salary but not understand and/or pursue stocks which is generally the bulk of the compensation or at at the very least, the biggest differentiator between individuals. Further, being at the top of band, they may receive small raises whereas those with lower base salary may receive higher.
> What exactly does posting race and gender data accomplish exactly, specifically?
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.
> What exactly does posting race and gender data accomplish exactly, specifically?
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.
> Some countries (including one that coined the term Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) ban the use of gender and race statistics in the interest of equity.
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.
Many, many jobs are only paid in straight wages. No commission, no bonuses. This bill will highlight the gap between the lowest-paying jobs and skilled trades, and induce pressure on workers to skill up (they see exactly how much they're missing out on) and on low-pay employers to offer more (because some of their workers are freshly motivated to jump ship).
> 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.”
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
> is that high enough such that it won't reveal individuals' salary, and thus a privacy violation
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.
You don't need an individual's salary to "address pay inequality". You need statistics along the axes of inequality that you choose to care about (which is another discussion altogether...)
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.
That's funny; this "cultural norm" only seems to exist when employees are concerned, while employers of course share your salary history widely and frequently. Equifax "The Work Number" boasts some 573 million records, of which they have leaked at least 170 million in the past. It seems you are getting played; markets, of course, profit from optimal information.
Government employees pay is already public. I assume the only people with a problem with it know they are not worth as much more than others as their compensation suggests.
Just to expound for a bit, labor market efficiency would be increased by income transparency. We all want our markets operating with as few distortions as possible, right?
I never said I found it weird, nor was I being dismissive. I was asking OP to question their own assumptions. Their default assumption was "salary is private" and I wanted them to ask themselves why they feel that way.
I suppose it's a good question, but I'd also ask people to justify why they think it isn't private.
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.
The first date question is interesting. I have two answers. First, it's a different context. A salary negotiation and a date are two very different things. But secondly, would it be so bad to get that out of the way up front? If one of her deal breakers is, "needs to make enough money" isn't it better if you both learn that sooner than later and not waste time?
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.
> If you own a house, the amount you paid for it and its current value are public information.
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.)
That's why I said if it was a recent purchase. You know, like someone who might be going on a first date who is more likely to have just purchased their home?
> 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?
Isn't this achieved from something like the CA law proposed but without demographic data?
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.
My preference would have been to simply require publicly posted job ranges on job listings. I would not even need maximum pay, the minimum pay would be enough info.
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.
It's objectively weird that your salary is private, except to other employers, banks, landlords, lenders, your cable company, and literally anyone else who pays Equifax $30 to run a credit check on you.
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.
It's not weird, but the reason you find it a privacy violation is that you're told so by employees (directly or indirectly. Employees are the only side to benefit from you being secretive about it.
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.
I am not a lawyer, but I'm not aware of any such law. Public employee salaries are already publicly posted. You can look up the salaries of any public employee - including those at state universities, municipalities, etc
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.
pay secrecy really only helps to make employers more money while punishing the people that aren't as good at negotiating that one week of their life that they did it at that job.
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.)
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.
> Serious question: which law protects salary information? And if this law exists, does it apply to employers only or does it extend beyond that?
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)
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.
> 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.”
I would have ambivalent feelings about the law without this, but with this I vehemently oppose it.
How can I report companies that fail to adhere to this law or put insane ranges? It’s already being abused by companies for Colorado salaries. I’m sick and tired of seeing 60-225k ranges. It’s complete bullshit. No person filling junior position will ever be offered close to 225k.
Why is this a problem? The purpose of the pay range is not to help you in your personal negotiation. It is to inform you of the going price in certain markets. If you think $60k is too low, find a different business or a different labor market to sell to. If you think $225k is too low, same thing.
If you want to maximize your own income, then you should obtain offers from competing buyers and pit them against each other.
Everyone is not posting $0 to infinite. See Colorado job listings. The most important number is the bottom of the pay range.
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.
I'm a big fan of pay transparency, but the objection noted in the article is a concern. If the categories are too broad, it will skew the data in a way that makes things look a lot worse than they are.
But I'm sure a whole niche consulting industry will be born to help large companies massage their data to look good...
Every regulation can have good and bad consequences. I think what matters is that a government can measure the impact of a law, and react quickly if it does not have the intended consequences.
Exactly. The BLS does report on pay discrepancies, and those reports use a huge number of characteristics and controls compared to this. Odd that they didn't want to use that as a template.
Quite a few commenters note (correctly) that non-salary compensation is a big part of tech compensation. This law isn't for you. This law is for "normal" jobs. Teachers, admin assistants, truck drivers, nurses, logistics people, etc. These are jobs that are almost entirely salary or an hourly wage for which pay transparency is incredibly useful in stopping people getting taken advantage of.
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.
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)
> 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.
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%.
yes and this 40hr presumption is exactly the issue I'm getting at. It's high time America does away with "Exempt" and start to at least report on actual hours worked and allow workers to upfront know the average hours expected and give workers the right to refuse work beyond their contract (average hours) .
You should, I maybe work 25 hours a week and and the only people in the company that make more than me are directors and C levels. And everyone on my team makes the same. Work life balance is important and working 20 or 80 hours won’t get you more pay, only more responsibility. I have one workaholic team member and we literally force him to take days off.
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.
I would rather work 50 hours per week and make a lot more now than have an "easy" WLB. Right now I need money, but the rules setup make it super tough (this plus progressive taxation that doesn't care how much money you average across life, just this year-- eg you could earn $1M in one year and nothing for 19 and still pay very high taxes while others earn $50k over 20 and they get an attractive rate).
capped more in gametheory/economic sense than from a purely legislative sense. The information of band means everyone wants the cap, but they don't necessarily deliver what the top of band delivers.
To help prevent that couldn't the company promote the super productive people to a new role so that they don't push up the cap for the non-productive people who stay at a lower role?
> 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.
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…”
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.
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.
> 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
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...
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 guess I'm uncomfortable with adding all of these restrictions and hoops to hiring people. I worry that it is a death-by-a-thousand-cuts situation, and employers will be motivated to look to alternatives, like robots and offshore centers.
Yeah, reminds me of how they fight against raising minimum wage saying robots are going to take jobs, but where are we now? There still aren't enough workers, and turns out robots are hard.
So how are you supposed to look up salaries by company? According to the shrm.com [1] article linked in TFA:
"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?
Hmmm. They are graphing the data since 1965. Did equity options even exist then? Because they make up almost all of CEO pay these days.
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
This is trivial. If you interview a person for Junior SW Engineer, and after a round of interviews decide that they have the expertise to be your DevOps lead engineer, just hire them as DevOps lead. The law doesn't stipulate which for which roles you can/cannot hire a person, only that you must report their compensation and the role they ultimately do. (Similarly, when they change jobs in the company, that would impact your reporting going forward.)
Similarly I applied (but didn't make it passed the second round of interviews) for a role with AWS that would have been about $900k. I got to set that expectation before the interview. I don't expect that to be as possible going forward with this law.
I do not understand. If you are able to “set the expectation” for work valued at $900k per year even before an interview, then surely they are betting they cannot find someone capable to hire for less.
I don't know why they don't just go the whole hog and require full disclosure, at least internally. For many companies, for some of the groups listed, this will defacto be the case (if you're the only Chinese Woman at your 100 person company, your salary is now public record).
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.
Employers will just create superfluous titles so they don’t have to price-match.
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.
"SB 1162 doesn’t make clear how the law applies to companies that employ workers remotely"
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?)
> 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.
Another option is the employer denies the employee’s request for a raise.
That sounds true. In practice I've been talking with people about their paybands for years and everyone understands that sometimes they will be below their payband's midpoint. In dozens of conversations like this that hasn't been a problem even once. The key is though to be able to explain why someone is placed in the payband where they are. Understanding where your employees stand and what they need to work on to progress is a key manager competency.
Good management isn’t paying everyone the same, but it is explaining to employees why there are differences and how that employee can reach the same pay as their peers. The law doesn’t need to force anyone to get a raise but it should help do what managers should be doing - managing their team. And if the management can’t come up with a good reason for the difference they either match the salary, the employee now has good cause to hunt for a job and perhaps can see if there’s a pattern against a protected class.
I don't have a review to reference, but I've heard that certain companies stopped hiring in Colorado, they even explicitly excluded Coloradoan in their job listings. Here is a website tracking companies that do it: https://www.coloradoexcluded.com/
It'll be a lot harder to exclude California, which represents 10% of the population, and even more of the population of professionals who can work remotely.
> Under the law, employers with 15 or more workers will be required to include pay ranges in job postings
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.
Having read all the details it's not clear that this applies to non-CA incorporated companies hiring remote workers who happen to reside in CA (or move to CA).
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.
Are these salary ranges to be announced when hiring or post hoc?
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.
My naive 2 cents:
1. Knowing others salary is not a right
2. Employer should have the option to be transparent or not. You can incentivize it, but better not force it.
This law doesn't result in 1), and 2) is the status quo, where practically no employer ever chooses to be transparent—the typical worker is the loser here.
Do we? I think everyone who would care about this is only likely to make a comment on a website and not actually push for it, which is a pretty good measure of whether we need something.
This is a good thing. Your pay shouldn’t depend on how good you were at negotiating on interview day. People with a lesser focus on social engineering don’t deserve lower pay for same work.
Negotiation doesn't work without substance. You need to be desirable in the first place and be one of the handful of people that can make a huge difference to a company.
First off "companies fleeing the state" is way overblown. A couple companies moved their legal HQ, but for example the Tesla office in California is still expanding. They just "moved" for tax reasons. But the people stayed here.
Secondly, I doubt many companies will leave given that all their competitors will also have to publish this information.
Its hardly the only state to do this. Many states that passed these laws already, such as Colorado, Connecticut, Nevada, Washington, New York, New Jersey and many more are introduced in state legislation around the country.
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.
Totally unnecessary. Just make levels granular so that there's never a large difference in the same role. Junior developer I, II, III, IV. Developer I, II, III, IV. Senior developer I, II... Then you can post whatever salary you want, just say that the candidates' experience and ability matches a different level if you want to pay them more or less. I don't see anything in the bill that prohibits companies from saying "your performance doesn't match level X, but we are willing to offer level Y".
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.
Let those companies that want to ignore 10% of the workforce go ahead. I'd say that's more idealist than complying with similar laws already enacted in other states as well.
California is a pretty huge talent pool to ignore, especially with Colorado already passing a similar law and many other states moving similar bills through legislature.
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.