$2 million brackets, job postings removed: New York’s pay transparency law got off to a rocky start

Companies may need to offer a wide range if they’re open to people of different levels of experience and to compete in a tight hiring market, says Domenique Camacho Moran, New York-based attorney at Farrell Fritz. .

A common strategy for companies is to find a target budget for a vacancy and give a range of 20% below and above that point, adds Tony Guadagni, senior director of research at consultancy Gartner.

But a range of over $100,000 could either be a mistake or show that “what an organization is willing to pay for a job can be quite variable,” Guadagni says.

“It’s hard to imagine that the two agencies investigating possible violations of the new law – the city’s Human Rights Commission and the Bureau of Law Enforcement – would in good faith consider a assignment that includes a minimum salary of $30,000 and a maximum salary of $300,000 representation of the salary range,” he adds. But it’s up to investigators to show that a salary range is not of good faith – not up to companies to prove it.

A salary range of $90,000, like the one Citi listed on the amended post that was later removed, is still “extremely wide” and “begs the question of whether this is a good effort.” faith,” says Beverly Neufeld, president of PowHer New York. and a supporter of a new law.

Similarly, wide ranges could reflect poorly on the company’s respect for workers, says Neufeld: “It says a lot about companies when they use potential loopholes. The spirit of the law is to create transparency, and any company with wide salary ranges like that doesn’t create any transparency.”

By law, employers must post the minimum and maximum salary offered for a particular position when it is listed on an internal job board, as well as on external sites such as LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed, and other platforms. job search. This also applies to any written description of a vacancy that is printed on a flyer, distributed at a job fair or submitted to newspaper classified ads.

In response, some companies may stop posting jobs and instead rely on other means of recruiting and hiring.

Employers could also avoid compliance if they hire remote workers but say the work cannot be done from New York. This happened in Colorado, where a similar law went into effect in January 2021. The state labor department issued a warning to hundreds of employers to comply with the law and, in July, had fined three companies for violations.