COMP NEWS – Employers in New York City will need to start posting salary ranges next to their job listings, thanks to new legislation that goes into effect on November 1st.
For years, companies of all sizes have closely guarded the potential pay for their job openings, keeping applicants in the dark about possible compensation and preventing employees from discovering that their colleagues make more than they do.
But that dynamic, which has long benefited corporations in salary negotiations and has been blamed for exacerbating gender and racial pay gaps, will soon end in New York City, one of the largest job markets in the world.
Under a new city law that goes into effect on Tuesday, nearly every company will be required to include salary ranges for job postings, both those shared on public sites and on internal bulletin boards, and even for those jobs that offer a hybrid schedule or can be performed fully remote.
New York City joins a number of other locations passing salary transparency legislation, such as Colorado and, soon, California.
The new requirements put New York City among a growing number of places in the United States that require salary transparency from private employers. The trend has taken hold during the pandemic as leverage in the American workplace has increasingly shifted toward workers.
Colorado implemented salary requirements for job openings earlier this year, and California and Washington State will mandate similar rules in 2023. The New York State Senate passed a salary transparency law in June that is similar to the one in New York City, but it has yet to be signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul.
One of the goals of pay transparency laws is to narrow the pay gap between men and women, as well as minorities.
Tae-Youn Park, an associate professor of human resource studies at Cornell University, said that research into salary disclosure laws that have been implemented elsewhere, including in Denmark, has shown that they help narrow the pay gap between men and women.
In the United States, women made about 82 cents for every $1 men earned in 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which said that pay inequity is constant across almost all occupations. The gap is larger for women of color.
Mr. Park said that the salary disclosures in New York City would likely force managers to compare their salaries to those offered at other companies and make adjustments. Also, employees might feel empowered to confront their bosses if the ranges showed they were underpaid.
“It will give them an opportunity to raise their voice with objective data,” Mr. Park said.
To read more about New York City’s new salary transparency laws, click here.
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