Salary law requires transparency, to a certain extent

Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll see how a New York City law that went into effect late last year helps workers enter the job market.

It’s been nearly seven months since New York City’s salary transparency law went into effect. It requires employers to disclose in job postings how much a particular job would pay. Our writer H. Claire Brown says that New York law, like similar state statutes elsewhere, can give job seekers a better idea of ​​how much they can expect to earn. I talked to her about how much of a difference the new laws make.

How many job openings now contain salary ranges?

In New York almost all have to. If an employer has less than four employees, no salary scales need to be published.

Nationally, I found that about a quarter of the workforce lives in places where paychecks are required to be posted, but there’s been a ripple effect. Indeed.com reports that about 45 percent of job openings nationwide have salary ranges, dramatically higher than before the pandemic, so the laws have pushed many companies to include salary ranges.

Whether they are useful is a whole other story.

And what is that? Do salary transparency laws make a difference?

Indeed, came across a potentially disturbing finding, which is that when you look at the payrolls in places with transparency laws, the margins are getting wider – in other words, the spread between minimum and maximum wages in job postings is growing.

There isn’t enough information to say whether there was a causal relationship between when a transparency law went into effect and when pay scales began to broaden, and most transparency laws contain untested language about what a pay scale should look like.

In my reporting, I found a Netflix job with a $60,000 to $210,000 range. That is not useful information for many people. Who is going to apply for a job where you can earn one or three and a half times as much?

Wall Street jobs often pay bonuses. Are bonuses covered by the city’s transparency laws?

No. Some states are starting to look into this, but New York doesn’t require companies to list the benefits — and a bonus falls into the category of things not covered by the law, no matter how big. How much you have to pay for health care also counts as a benefit, and New York doesn’t require that in a posting, just base pay.

So even with transparency laws, job seekers still don’t necessarily get the full picture of a job opening, right?

Right. For timepieces where you typically don’t get a bonus and don’t expect much bargaining power over things like how much vacation you’re entitled to, the lists are much more accurate, while when you get higher incomes with bonuses, they’re less so. Indeed.com says this is the case nationwide.

Even in very tight labor markets, such as childcare, where there is always a shortage, you see ranges that are more accurate.

There may be a correlation between the demand for your skills and the amount of information you can expect from a job posting, because in the technology sector, where the story is currently about layoffs, the reach is getting wider. And a wider range could be a way to disguise falling salaries.

How is remote work treated under payroll transparency laws?

That’s what the city says Out-of-state employers must include salary ranges when they advertise jobs – if they expect to attract applicants from out of town.

These laws have exposed wage differences, haven’t they?

I interviewed a 25-year-old copywriter named Kimberly Nguyen who was hired by the consulting firm Photon to work as a contractor for Citigroup. Actually, she worked for Citi. She had Citi bosses, but technically her direct employer was the consulting firm. And it is the direct employer, in this case the temporary employment agency, who is responsible for determining the wage and paying the salary.

Then a job posting for a copywriter popped up on her LinkedIn feed with Citi as the direct employer. The salary was much higher – $31,000 was the minimum difference. She asked her Citi supervisor about the ad and was frustrated that she didn’t get a straight answer. That’s when she took to Twitter and the thread went viral. As of last week, her situation hadn’t changed (although Citi told me after my original story was published that the job posted was for someone more experienced than her).

The bottom line is that she felt she would have gotten more money as a direct hire, and the Transparency Act enabled her to find out.

What are the sanctions for employers who do not comply? How are salary transparency laws enforced?

In most cases, the penalty is a fine. And it’s probably worth pointing out that state and local governments haven’t said much about how they plan to deal with employers who list overly broad pay ranges or find ways to bypass wage disclosure altogether.

In New York, the city would not say whether any investigations have been opened or anyone has been fined – the spokesman for the city’s Commission on Human Rights would not comment on ongoing investigations. The only data point was that their tip line had received more than 300 non-compliance complaints.

If you’re getting your very first job or if you’re a career switcher looking for a job in a new industry and you have no idea what the salary standards are, these transparency laws can be helpful. They’re more useful if you don’t have contacts to ask, if you don’t have a network, which is really the point. Pay transparency laws were intended as a measure to close the pay gap between men and women and people of different races. The idea is that the availability of this information will force employers to commit to a standard offering for employees of all backgrounds and help employees understand what their work is worth.

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METROPOLITAN Diary

Strike of midnight

Dear Diary:

It was late one evening in the fall of 2021. I was relatively new to New York and had gotten a cheap rent on 143rd Street. Coming home on the 1 train from Chelsea most evenings, I often snuggled up with a podcast or playlist.

However, on this particular night, I wasn’t wearing my headphones and happened to overhear a teenager telling his friends that his birthday would be in 14 minutes. We were around 59th Street and it was 11:46 PM

I decided that if he stayed on the train until midnight, I would surprise him by singing “Happy Birthday.”

Several minutes passed. We were now on 110th Street. The boy was still on the train. I checked the time: 11:56.

Another three minutes passed and he didn’t get out. My heart started beating faster at what I was going to do: would he like it? Would he find it strange?

I waited until the clock struck midnight and started singing. As I had hoped, the boy was shocked and delighted. His friends joined in enthusiastically and filmed the encounter. Some other passengers sang along.

After we finished, an older man sitting next to me spoke in a shocked tone.

“It’s my birthday too!” he said. “I just turned 78!”

He pulled out his driver’s license to show it to me. He had also waited until the clock struck midnight.

We all sang “Happy Birthday” again.

— Lucy Powers

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here And read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — JB

PS Here’s today’s Mini crossword And Game match. You can find all our puzzles here.

Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.

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