July 18, 2023

What Effects Are Salary Transparency Laws Having?

While still not a federal law, many states and localities have enacted laws aimed at providing greater salary transparency for job seekers as well as researchers and policy makers concerned about issues like wage gaps by gender or race. New York State passed its own pay transparency law in 2022, and now that the law is in effect, researchers are starting to get a better picture of whether and how much it helps job hunters.

For one thing, it gives new entrants into the workforce a much better idea of what they are facing, and can aid them in negotiating salary. According to the National Women’s Law Center more than 25% of the country is now aided by new laws and the number of new job listings that include salaries is up. 

However, employers and HR departments are choosing to advertise salary bands, a possible range of pay, that are often too broad to be of any use to a potential job seeker. According to a New York Times story, Netflix, for example, advertised a senior manager job with a pay band of $195k-$510k; hardly much use to applicants. As the Times reports, this trend seems to be expanding among high pay industries including tech, pharmaceuticals, and scientific R&D.

One issue is that states and localities have little in the way of concrete plans on how to enforce their pay transparency laws, allowing companies to muddy the waters for job seekers. In New York City, the Human Rights Commission has received hundreds of complaints about noncompliance, but has not disclosed whether any action has been taken. These transparency laws are gaining in popularity as conflict between employers and workers heats up, with a labor market that is still hot.

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Women's Employment Still Reeling from Pandemic’s Effects

January 12, 2021
Gender Discrimination
According to the latest analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the pandemic and lockdowns continue to have an outsize effect on women’s employment in the U.S. with fewer than half (44.6%) of the jobs women lost between February and December returning. Another way of looking at it is that roughly 12 million jobs simply disappeared. Or, as Representative Katie Porter tweeted, “Women. Accounted. For. All. The. Losses.”

Paid Maternity Leave Finds an Unlikely Champion, But Is That Enough?

January 8, 2021
Pregnancy Discrimination
Paid Family Leave
On the heels of some important wins for paid leave in the 2020 election, paid maternity leave has found a new supporter. One who you might not have expected: conservative co-host of The View Megan McCain. The challenge is, as Monica Hesse notes, “how we can speed up this process so that it doesn’t require every leave-denier to personally birth a child before they also get on board.”

Motivational Speaker Tony Robbins Sued over Covid-related Discrimination

December 29, 2020
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A new lawsuit, filed by an employee of the motivational speaker Tony Robbins, alleges that Robins’s company, Robbins Research International, along with Robbins and his wife Bonnie, discriminated against the employee who requested reasonable accommodations be met for her recovery from coronavirus.

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