New Laws Are Forcing Employers to Share Salary Details With Applicants
November 22, 2021 9:04 AM   Subscribe

Companies would rather exclude *entire states* from employment than list a salary range in a job posting Colorado’s pay transparency law, which has been in effect since January, is perhaps the most expansive and experimental of its kind. The transparency rules apply even to national companies who are hiring remotely. This stipulation initially caused national firms to exclude Colorado residents from their remote job openings earlier this year. For example, a remote listing from Realogy, a publicly-traded real estate firm, read: “This position can be performed anywhere except Colorado.” Dozens of other companies, including Nike, Johnson and Johnson, and IBM, used similar language in their listings after the law took effect.
posted by folklore724 (50 comments total) 34 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is the stupidest thing. There was one listing I looked at last week that said “The Salary range for this role is $127,504- 204,256 for Colorado-based positions only. Other locations will vary in salary range.” My questions include: How do you think this is supposed to work, exactly? Do you think people in other states can't read those numbers and know how to set their own value? How do you think you can enforce your geographic salary arbitrage? Do you think money works differently in different locations? What is the work actually worth?
posted by fedward at 9:11 AM on November 22, 2021 [39 favorites]


It's like every time they try to come up with a law that will actually help the people living in a place it gets perverted and twisted around to bite those same people in the ass one way or another.
posted by bleep at 9:19 AM on November 22, 2021 [13 favorites]


for Colorado-based positions only. Other locations will vary in salary range

I'd guess that the story there is that there's some minor bureaucrat whose job it is to comply with state laws. And complying with the law by listing national salary ranges would take a certain amount of effort, and lead to a certain amount of lability for getting it wrong, and doing it for Colorado only would be slightly less. So that's what they do.
posted by alexei at 9:22 AM on November 22, 2021 [4 favorites]


I remember my sister fussing about the fact that if she moved back to Boston (our home town), she couldn't afford to live here on her current salary. Yes, I said, but if you live here you'll make more doing the same work.

Why? Because it's a desirable location. Ok, fine. But no one is going to come out way ahead financially, anywhere, based on their location and skills. One good thing about the internet and "globalization" is that it exposes all these artificial barriers for what they really are.
posted by Melismata at 9:28 AM on November 22, 2021 [1 favorite]


Yeah, I’m in Colorado and starting to look for work again and on various job boards I see lots of major employers not including the pay range at all. Why bother, when the penalties would be less expensive than complying?
posted by mochapickle at 9:30 AM on November 22, 2021 [11 favorites]


I'd love for the State of Colorado to start aggressively crossing state lines to enforce this.

What would happen if they took a stance of, "if you do business in CO, the law applies, regardless of where your employees are located"?

A Colorado-based company would be bound by this law, even for remote positions. So why not a Seattle-based mega-conglomerate who does business in CO? Is Amazon really going to stop doing business in Colorado entirely just to dodge this law?

Are the courts going to rule that the state law doesn't apply to companies because "well actually they're incorporated in Delaware"?
posted by explosion at 9:37 AM on November 22, 2021 [16 favorites]


“The Salary range for this role is $127,504- 204,256 for Colorado-based positions only. Other locations will vary in salary range.”

If it's legal to list a job with a $75K range, or 60% of the low end of that payscale, the law is entirely fucking useless. Why not just say the range is from minimum wage to infinity dollars?
posted by Vulgar Euphemism at 9:38 AM on November 22, 2021 [37 favorites]


enh, salary spreads like that are common with bigger employers.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:44 AM on November 22, 2021 [10 favorites]


Yeah, I'm a little curious how Colorado plans to keep employers from just posting an arbitrarily large salary range, like from whatever they pay summer interns all the way up to whatever the CEO makes, on every job posting.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:52 AM on November 22, 2021 [1 favorite]


...and then there's also the opposite question: are applicants forbidden from negotiating a salary outside the original posted range?
posted by kickingtheground at 9:55 AM on November 22, 2021 [2 favorites]


Legally I'd assume the only obligation would be to update future listings to take the new negotiated salary into account, though hiring managers will probably try to claim that negotiating outside that range is illegal.
posted by Vulgar Euphemism at 10:01 AM on November 22, 2021


So why not a Seattle-based mega-conglomerate who does business in CO? Is Amazon really going to stop doing business in Colorado entirely just to dodge this law?

No. They'd setup an arm's length company to specifically do business in Colorado with. Amazon? They do no business in Colorado. You must be thinking of Rocky Mountain Inventory Holding Company, not Amazon. RMIHC only licenses the Amazon name, the other Amazon IP, and hosts on AWS servers for 100% of its net income. All Colorado requests get diverted to the RMIHC infrastructure.

Why do you think every large company eventually incorporates in Delaware? It's not because of the picturesque landfill along Wilmington's waterfront. It's because they receive favorable treatment on everything from tax to legal matters.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 10:02 AM on November 22, 2021 [25 favorites]


How do you think you can enforce your geographic salary arbitrage?

I mean, they just do. I made ironic note of that article to a senior executive, and it earned me a two-minute rant about "entitled" tech workers who are lucky to be able to work for Google at all expecting to "get over" by working wherever they want.

Years and years ago I worked for a company that set up a satellite engineering hub in Bangalore. All the high-level architects lived and worked in the US. The Bangalore office was just there to do the implementation. Headcount there bursted up and down as needed, and nobody was expected or allowed to show a ton of autonomy. It "worked" and it was cheap.

Then I worked for a company that expanded into a lower-paying Western European country, but over the course of a few years salaries there took off as more global companies set up shop, and the general quality of the labor pool improved quickly. So the kind of talent coming in ended up expecting to do more than low-level maintenance and sustaining engineering work. It stopped making sense to aggressively expand there, because the timezone penalty and equalizing wages made it less attractive. That office halted expansion before it hit half the long-term regional target.

So off the company went to Eastern Europe on the advice of an executive who'd been in that market years earlier. Once again, it turned out those folks had higher expectations for the kind of work they cared to do. The wage gap was definitely still there, but, like, it turned out these people had the Internet and stuff. They were educated, skilled people and while maybe they couldn't do much about the pay, they could do something about the working conditions by finding somewhere that paid better than local market rate for a former Soviet satellite but let them do meaningful work. Since they started from a lower basement than their Western European predecessors, maybe it'll take them more time to catch up on pay, but by then climate change will create new "opportunities" for moving into areas with depressed wages but educated workforces.

Now, in the past 18 months, managers got excited about the shift to remote or hybrid-remote, because it meant companies were being forced to retool to accommodate hybrid working models, so why not enjoy the benefits? Recruiters worked hand-in-glove with compensation specialists to figure out the most favorable regions (e.g. the Carolinas and Georgia), where local market rates were running 80 percent of the West Coast tech hubs and went out of their way to make sure listings were posted in those "favorable" places.

And that brings us to that WIRED article and Google (and other tech companies) indexing wages to region as employees working in those expensive tech hubs see an opportunity to stretch their wages, move closer to family it was easier to live apart from pre-pandemic, or get away from having to live in places their own industry has helped hollow out or render unlivable. People like my angry senior executive are acting all surprised and ruffled because somehow all these tech workers have the Internet and stuff, pass around spreadsheets, compare notes, and are friendly with hiring managers who openly talk about going for employees in "favorable" regions, or work for companies that adopted transparency policies because they also stressed their "in-office" working culture and excluded remote people from wealthier tech hubs (making pay transparency an internal equity question, not a macro-economic one). Some companies are going back on their transparency policies a little: One all-remote company I interviewed with twice over the past two years had a very transparent pay calculator that included regional multipliers and anyone could access -- employees and random people alike -- the first time I interviewed, then moved it behind the firewall in the past year when they invited me back for another interview. The hiring manager told me they didn't want to provide data to competitors who are now suddenly all remote.

For some reason, the management class thought it would reap some kind of perpetual windfall by spotting a trend that can't help but be universally exploited, and hence has a remarkably short half-life. So they're mad, but they're also in the grips of a mentality that workers are definitionally supposed to be exploited. That if anyone is going to benefit from an imbalance in power or economics it is supposed to be management. That being a wage earner means you're supposed to be kept out of emerging opportunities and just take your ration in the hopes that if the company can exploit enough people in enough places, you'll get a few pennies of trickle-down.

Well, let's see how that goes.
posted by mph at 10:04 AM on November 22, 2021 [67 favorites]


So why not a Seattle-based mega-conglomerate who does business in CO? Is Amazon really going to stop doing business in Colorado entirely just to dodge this law?

Companies use things called professional employer organizations (PEOs) to get around unfavorable local conditions.

I worked for a company in Oregon that had most of its Oregon residents in PEO, while people like me were, through an acquisition-related fluke, employed by the actual California business entity.

One example of how it worked: I compared notes with someone who had quit from the PEO and didn't get an accrued PTO payout because Oregon law (which the PEO operated under) says you don't get a payout if your employer doesn't say you will. When it was my turn to move on, I got four weeks of PTO payout because the California entity -- the actual business, not the PEO -- was legally obligated to pay me.

The PEO people were kept at arms length (no travel to the annual company all-hands, no annual Christmas gifts from HQ, paid for health benefits I got for free) and were generally less secure because they were legally contractors managed by the PEO.
posted by mph at 10:17 AM on November 22, 2021 [11 favorites]


The thing about offshoring or inshoring or whatever sort of location-based arbitrage companies have tried to do is that it is never free of costs just for doing it that way. When you rely too much on contractors, you lose productivity every time they walk out the door and you have to bring the next one(s) up to speed. When you rely on people in, say, India, you also have to deal with turnaround time that basically never works out the way you want it to (the management fantasy being that you assign tasks at COB US time and they're done, perfectly, by the next morning). And if you're relying on an office somewhere in the US that real estate is cheaper, you'll find the talent pool is shallower and (now, especially) the cream of that talent will rise out of your organization to one that has a flatter salary arrangement.

Yes, I have worked for companies that have suffered from all of these problems, usually several of them at once.
posted by fedward at 10:22 AM on November 22, 2021 [10 favorites]


Yeah, I'm a little curious how Colorado plans to keep employers from just posting an arbitrarily large salary range, like from whatever they pay summer interns all the way up to whatever the CEO makes, on every job posting.

The law specifically covers such issues. "Posting a 'Range.' Where an employer posts a range of possible compensation, the range may extend from the lowest to the highest pay the employer actually believes it might pay for the particular job, depending on circumstances including employee qualifications, employer finances, and other operational considerations. An employer may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, as long as the posted range, at the time of the posting, was what the employer genuinely believed it would be willing to pay for the job.”

It then goes on to provide examples, one such being: "An employer cannot post the same $30,000-$100,000 range for janitor and accountant jobs alike, if it does not genuinely anticipate offering an accountant the low end, or a janitor the high end."

Of course practical enforcement is another matter, but having the law on the books is an important first step.
posted by xigxag at 10:26 AM on November 22, 2021 [11 favorites]


I am learning a lot about HR manipulations by the comments already posted.

I’ve also heard from a few newly hired people about their discomfort when learning they were brought on at a salary higher than the long-term employees in their department. HR posting a salary range is going to be a massive problem for the companies that haven’t done a good job of ensuring pay for existing employees kept pace with current new hire salary ranges.

And I have no sympathy for companies that have painted themselves into a hiring corner because of their own short-sighted profits uber alle compensation practices, especially companies that awarded million dollar bonuses to execs while awarding merit increases below inflation rates. Seriously - screw them all.
posted by Silvery Fish at 10:31 AM on November 22, 2021 [10 favorites]


"An employer cannot post the same $30,000-$100,000 range for janitor and accountant jobs alike, if it does not genuinely anticipate offering an accountant the low end, or a janitor the high end."


Well, that sure seems unenforceable. Perhaps I will find the world's best janitor, and in that case I will definitely pay them the high end. Perhaps I'll find an accountant who has taken a vow of poverty. It's never happened yet, but I genuinely anticipate it could happen, right?
posted by blnkfrnk at 10:39 AM on November 22, 2021


...and then there's also the opposite question: are applicants forbidden from negotiating a salary outside the original posted range?

My experience in large companies says yes.

For compensation, the hiring manager is a middleman between the candidate and HR/Accounting. The budget for the team was set six months ago, and the employee in that slot is required to be a specific pay band. There might be a way to bypass that budget rule, but it would require the hiring manager to do a lot more work and make a special justification to their bosses. Most won't invest that time into a job candidate, especially since the salary range was up front.
posted by meowzilla at 10:42 AM on November 22, 2021 [3 favorites]


The idea that the statute is "unenforceable" feels like learned helplessness. Taking companies' explanations at face value is a choice. Just because a law's parameters aren't quantitatively defined doesn't mean it's unenforceable. Staff an office with smart and empowered people given a mission and mandate to enforce the statute, and it'll pay for itself if the fine schedule has been set appropriately.
posted by dusty potato at 10:50 AM on November 22, 2021 [27 favorites]


Most won't invest that time into a job candidate, especially since the salary range was up front.

They wouldn't do it before, either, and you just had to get farther along into the process to find out that they're undervaluing the role and/or you. That's one reason salary transparency is important. Instead of investing a lot of time and effort trying to land a job at a company that will undervalue you, you can tell up front that they're going to try their damnedest and you can just move along.
posted by fedward at 10:53 AM on November 22, 2021 [7 favorites]


It depends on your industry of course but H1B salary information is public, and should be roughly similar to people in the same position.
posted by meowzilla at 11:06 AM on November 22, 2021 [2 favorites]


Well in a slow market they wouldn't go outside salary bands but I can tell you those rules fall pretty fast when you can't find a candidate you need to secure a contract.
posted by emjaybee at 11:28 AM on November 22, 2021 [3 favorites]


If it's legal to list a job with a $75K range, or 60% of the low end of that payscale, the law is entirely fucking useless. Why not just say the range is from minimum wage to infinity dollars?

Ever looked at the salary details for a company on Glassdoor? They don't seem to have any way of handling extreme range or outlying data, so positions that might pay largely with equity have just the best ranges you'll ever see. Salary: $X Bonus: $Y Equity: $1 - $3,200,000
posted by Mayor West at 12:04 PM on November 22, 2021


I'm a bit curious--when I was hiring we were a niche profession so I would often post for the "ideal" level for our needs but would change it during the application process if the best candidate was above or below that. It required a bit of HR paperwork but was easy enough on our end. Would that run afoul of this law? Or would I just post the range from the lowest point of the lowest level to the highest one?

It's never happened yet, but I genuinely anticipate it could happen, right?

(1) You probably do not genuinely anticipate it would happen, and thus would have to perjure yourself to defend this choice.

(2) Any mid-sized plus company I have does, in fact, have internal ranges and would not pay an accountant less, regardless of the accountants needs. Seriously, if an candidate said they only needed 30k, I would still pay them 70k (or whatever) and tell them to deal with tithing or charitable donations or whatever on their own time and leave me out of it.

Instead of investing a lot of time and effort trying to land a job at a company that will undervalue you, you can tell up front that they're going to try their damnedest and you can just move along.

It'll help at the margins but there will still be plenty of people who are left with an offer at the lower end of a range after going through the process. People might assume they can negotiate up but they won't have as much flexibility as they think.

Our company made our ranges by grade open to employees. As a manager I often had employees treat anything not in the upper end of a range was an insult. My manager attitude was that I had people who've been at this level for five years, of course someone just moving up and less experienced overall would be earning less.
posted by mark k at 12:04 PM on November 22, 2021 [1 favorite]


Anyway, I love this law. My company isn't trying to hire in Colorado SPECIFICALLY, but the wording of the law is pretty explicit, and our legal counsel must have seen something that scares them, because every position we post that has the possibility of being remote now has a salary range on it. That was not the case a year ago. It's just scary enough that a bunch of compliance attorneys have said "yeah, no, we don't want to be the example that an angry attorney general decides to set." It's not perfect, and won't fix everything, but it's a good step toward normalizing the discussion about salary.
posted by Mayor West at 12:08 PM on November 22, 2021 [23 favorites]


lucky to be able to work for Google at all

One reason I'm glad to work at a nondescript company and not a Big! Name! is that the management of those always seem to expect their people to pretend to feel privileged to work there. I mean, the time I worked for an also-ran mobile device company, my first day was an intro into how great the company is and how we're supposed to behave as representatives of The Company, including things like "hide your work badge when you go for lunch" (presumably to avoid the groupies.)

</derail>
posted by suetanvil at 12:11 PM on November 22, 2021 [5 favorites]


Wait, are there relatively large companies that don't provide salary ranges for employees' roles? Honest question.
posted by nushustu at 12:25 PM on November 22, 2021


As someone who does this a lot I usually start with asking their budget (along with how many interviews to expect). I am in a niche field in tech so maybe I’m an outlier but it isn’t hard to figure out my salary bands within a few interviews. I’ve seen 150k for a CTO position at a major regional employer (no joke). For jobs that are remote the bands are usually a lot more realistic unless you’re competing with offshore. I’ve had 50/50 bad jobs with good jobs and salary won’t tell you anything. Similarly any interview question will only get you the answer you want to hear. I’d easily accept a job from someone I know for significantly less than a random company who has an urgent need.
posted by geoff. at 12:40 PM on November 22, 2021


those rules fall pretty fast when you can't find a candidate you need to secure a contract

A strange artifact of the crazy world we're in is that a lot of companies say they're desperate to fill jobs but they're not actually adapting, so the jobs remain unfilled (WaPo, usual paywall). Vox also went deep on the subject (no paywall).
posted by fedward at 1:02 PM on November 22, 2021 [12 favorites]


I like this law.

When I was in media allied to a print brand, salaries for new hires went down every year.

So I had a direct report who made $10k more than me, a direct report that made half that, and a dotted line report in a very similar role who made $10k less than the half of the first person. (No one north of $80k, so these were significant quality of life differences.)

I tried to sort that out and advocate as their manager and was laid off a few months later, so.
posted by warriorqueen at 1:36 PM on November 22, 2021 [16 favorites]


enh, salary spreads like that are common with bigger employers.

Just because something's common doesn't make it right.

Wait, are there relatively large companies that don't provide salary ranges for employees' roles?

The only employer I've looked at who ever provided a salary range was the federal government. The current place I work for (600+ employees) keeps that information under lock and key and my boss complained about an ex-coworker who shared his salary with me. Where are you finding companies that do share a salary range?
posted by Anonymous at 1:50 PM on November 22, 2021


I'm on a international slack for LGBT+ people in tech, and we let LGBT+ folks post job ads, but require the salary ranges if the job is available for people in Colorado, and delete posts that lack them, or ones that try to get around them.

Someone is going to create a hiring platform geared towards making the potential employees happy instead of just pleasing employers, and make a fortune because that's where people will go to look, and people want people to see the jobs they advertise.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 1:56 PM on November 22, 2021 [11 favorites]


maybe I’m an outlier but it isn’t hard to figure out my salary bands within a few interviews.

Overall I think you are. I don't think I've ever had more than two interviews for a job (even the ones I was successful for). While not directly on topic for the post article this sort of requirement is a huge win for all the home care workers, cashiers, drywallers and forklift drivers out there.

Wait, are there relatively large companies that don't provide salary ranges for employees' roles? Honest question.

There must be otherwise those companies wouldn't be avoid Colorado.

One reason I'm glad to work at a nondescript company and not a Big! Name! is that the management of those always seem to expect their people to pretend to feel privileged to work there.

This is the big company version of the small company "We're a big family" lie.

my boss complained about an ex-coworker who shared his salary with me.

Whenever a company tells me not to share salary information I know someone is getting underpaid and I immediately start sharing around to find out if it's me.
posted by Mitheral at 2:00 PM on November 22, 2021 [9 favorites]


An important thing to consider is the iterative nature of hiring, particularly at large companies. If a company fills positions on a particular job title 20 times a year, then each time they exceed the salary range they need to post the next listing with their new high offer. Likewise, if they never end up near the bottom of the range they need in some reasonable time frame to update that data as well. There is a pretty robust paper trail for potential prosecution if you fill forty positions at between 50k and 75k but somehow your listings stay at 40-55k.
This also means that current employees get information about their incoming peers. Someone in that position who was making 45k a year and sees the new listings are now at 45-75k has a great opportunity to demand an explanation. I've already heard at least one employer interview on NPR who said it is making them more diligent about proactively addressing current employee salaries so that hiring agreements don't lose them other employees.
More states should do this.
posted by meinvt at 2:07 PM on November 22, 2021 [10 favorites]


Whenever a company tells me not to share salary information I know someone is getting underpaid and I immediately start sharing around to find out if it's me.

Oh, it absolutely was and still is me! It's why I want a new job, it's insulting!
posted by Anonymous at 2:12 PM on November 22, 2021


Someone is going to create a hiring platform geared towards making the potential employees happy instead of just pleasing employers

Having just come to the end of a 4-month employment search — yes, please. Top on my want list: a single place to enter all of my employment history which other companies can connect to and integrate into their own system. So MANY wasted hours cleaning up the botched job certain systems made when importing my resume — or equally pointless hours uploading a resume and then having to fill out their forms on top of it.

Yes — someone please make an employee-centric employment website that employers will clamor to integrate with.
posted by Silvery Fish at 2:15 PM on November 22, 2021 [8 favorites]


I'm on a international slack for LGBT+ people in tech, and we let LGBT+ folks post job ads, but require the salary ranges if the job is available for people in Colorado, and delete posts that lack them, or ones that try to get around them.

A mailing list I'm on has gone a step farther and requires them from all postings or they'll be deleted. It's geared towards jobs in progressive organizations so the mods decided the list's requirements needed to reflect their values.
posted by Anonymous at 2:17 PM on November 22, 2021


But no one is going to come out way ahead financially, anywhere, based on their location and skills.

I'm consulting in the Silicon Valley while living in Mexico right now. Financially it's working out very well.

The current company even knows I'm living in Mexico. I keep a business address in Los Angeles to use for people who have no reason to know where I really live.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 3:28 PM on November 22, 2021 [5 favorites]


Someone is going to create a hiring platform geared towards making the potential employees happy instead of just pleasing employers, and make a fortune because that's where people will go to look, and people want people to see the jobs they advertise.

Would that it were so. Unfortunately, those platforms have been tried, and one of two things happened:

1. It was immediately co-opted by the interests of job-posters, who are willing to pay money to have their listings hosted while job-seekers are not
2. It quickly ran out of money because job-seekers are even less likely to pay for content than humanity as a whole

A user-centric hiring platform would be fantastic, but it would only work if you could find a way to monetize job-searchers. I don't know how you would do that, but I bet it would be even uglier than how Facebook does it.
posted by Mayor West at 4:35 PM on November 22, 2021 [7 favorites]


> Whenever a company tells me not to share salary information I know someone is getting underpaid and I immediately start sharing around to find out if it's me.

Yesterday a coworker asked me how much I pay in union dues. It felt sort of rebellious to bring up my paystub on my phone and slide it over to them. It shouldn't feel odd -- we have the same job title and same pay -- but it goes against some instinct I have, probably taught to me by past employers.
posted by The corpse in the library at 4:41 PM on November 22, 2021 [10 favorites]


Divide and conquer.
posted by Oyéah at 6:03 PM on November 22, 2021 [1 favorite]


I had an interesting sort of inverted thing happen this fall. My small 20ish head tech company, fully remote with employees across the country, got acquired by a 250 or so person unicorn, fully in-office pre-pandemic, based in Colorado. Turns out we were all much better-paid than their engineers, thanks to mostly being supported by government contracts up until about a year ago. I saw their CO-mandated hiring bands and winced. (Thankfully salaries came over, as did staying remote. No idea what they’ll do if — when — information spreads about pay parity. Hopefully it comes up in the DEI initiatives the C suite is at least vocally enthusiastic about.)
posted by supercres at 11:12 PM on November 22, 2021 [1 favorite]


What's interesting is that the other (and, I think, much smarter) reform that people have been successfully pushing for recently is banning potential employers from demanding salary history. There's a tension, though, between that idea, and this Colorado law - the new employer could look through the old employer's job postings and use that information to offer the new employee less.
posted by kickingtheground at 11:30 PM on November 22, 2021 [4 favorites]


Tangentially related but tied up in the salary and possible info sharing element of all this: i manage a team of 9 (in engineering consulting with publicly available CHARGE RATES, so what we can pay people is constrained by the available multiplier, at least in principle) and I have a couple of rock starts, and a couple of middlin's. No real duds. However, the middlin's perceive the gap and agitate for more pay...but if we equalized it all maybe the rock stars would lose motivation. From my perspective as manager who doesn't espeically want to be manager, and who has said repeatedly "I gain nothing from not getting you everything I can every year", it just feels like best case it's a race to the middle.

restated: differentiation within a band seems necessary to me. differentiation within a band is almost always going to alienate the lower end if they knew about it.
posted by hearthpig at 4:50 AM on November 23, 2021 [2 favorites]


I am on a subreddit for GIS (geographic information systems). The moderators there recently decided to allow job postings only if they indicate a pay range.
posted by NotLost at 6:47 AM on November 23, 2021


Yesterday a coworker asked me how much I pay in union dues. It felt sort of rebellious to bring up my paystub on my phone and slide it over to them. It shouldn't feel odd -- we have the same job title and same pay -- but it goes against some instinct I have, probably taught to me by past employers.

I don't know about you but about half the times I've been hired the salary negotiations consisted of numbers being written on a piece of paper and slid back and forth across a table. Part and parcel with "let's make a secret out of this" I think.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 3:11 PM on November 23, 2021


including things like "hide your work badge when you go for lunch" (presumably to avoid the groupies.)

It's also a good way to not advertise where you work, at least that's what my security trainings claim.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 7:15 PM on November 23, 2021 [1 favorite]


>>including things like "hide your work badge when you go for lunch" (presumably to avoid the groupies.)
>
>It's also a good way to not advertise where you work, at least that's what my security trainings claim.


There was a time where recruiters haunted the Fry's parking lot. Badges made it too easy for them.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:54 PM on November 24, 2021


I live in Colorado and contract locally and inter/nationally but occasionally look for local "real" jobs. Interestingly enough, the CDLE (CO Dept of Labor and Employment) job listings that go out to "unemployed" people in Colorado STILL don't have salary listings and I finally got tired of reporting it. FFS.

This is a great law and should be enforced and also (at least) the standard nationwide. I wasted a lot of time last year applying (based on the recommendation of a well-paid IT friend) and going through an initial interview for a job at his company. It eventually turned out that for a VERY experienced content position (Denver, not remote) they wanted to offer a whopping $42-50K per year. Yah, Davida, I don't think so.
posted by cyndigo at 7:14 PM on November 25, 2021 [3 favorites]


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