This is why I believe that many of these worker protection laws will wind up bringing more harm than good unless they can be implemented at the federal level. I cannot imagine how difficult it would be for a small or mid-size company to try and maintain compliance with a patchwork of 50 different state regulations.
Suppose Colorado has a law saying that all new roles must be presented to current employees as promotional opportunities and then Michigan (hypothetically) passes a law saying that all new roles must be presented to students graduating from Michigan State first? These laws could be in direct conflict, so which state does the company pick?
Do you spin up entire HR and Legal departments just to make sure you're not violating laws in states in which you don't even have employees yet? The easiest thing to do is just say "this law is too complicated for us to deal with right now, so we've decided not to hire here." Worse, this kind of law gives a huge advantage to FAANG-type companies who _can_ afford such intricacies.
The thing is that there are fundamental trade offs that you can't escape even if you make laws at the federal level.
Laws which add costs to labor means that wages are going to be lower than if those costs weren't there. In a tight labor market that means employers have to go elsewhere, so more outsourcing or they cut back on labor employed. There is a reason why Europe has such high unemployment rates (and comparatively lower salaries) and struggles especially with youth employment. But they have much better worker protections. It's a tradeoff.
Now that doesn't mean it's not worth it to pass certain worker protections. But every such protection will have a cost in terms of reducing demand for labor. Maybe the cost is small and the benefit is high, in which case, go for it. But don't pretend that the costs aren't going to be paid if you federalize the law, or that there is some sort of legal arrangement you can make to outlaw economic tradeoffs. The costs will just be paid in a different way.
And it's not like everyone in Colorado is suddenly unemployed. Lots of people are hiring Colorado workers. It's just a small decrease in demand for Colorado labor in response to a small increase in employer headaches for hiring people in that state. If those who supported this law didn't expect exactly this to happen, then they were uninformed. I am assuming most people in Colorado knew this would happen and decided to pass the law anyway. Time will tell whether the benefits outweigh the costs, but there are always such tradeoffs.
This is not wrong, but I feel you are hiding the adversity inherent to employee-employer relations. Why is there such a labor glut anways? If it's an immaterial underconsumptionist / keyensian demand-shortfall type problem, how can we boost aggregate demand and broad population purchasing power. If it's some sort of supply glut / too much productivity issue, how can we all work less?
Speaking about these issues as if they are "engineering tradeoffs" ignores that the status quo is not static and universal.
> I feel you are hiding the adversity inherent to employee-employer relations.
The only adversity inheritent to the employer/employee system is the same adversity inheritent to any buyer/seller relationship. Both want to extract the most from the other while providing the least. Sellers curse when it's a buyer's market and buyers curse when it's a seller's market, and buyers always want it to be a buyers market and vice versa. That's pretty normal and appears in every market, including the labor market. If you are buying flat screen TVs, you need to understand that the flatscreen TV makers are not your friend. They will charge as much as they possibly can. That doesn't mean you hate them, but if you feel personally wounded when they try to screw you over, then you are in for a life lesson. Be wary and avoid brand loyalties. The same with your employer. I don't think this is something I am trying to hide.
In an ideal world, if you want to make a job posting, you just put up the job posting. Instead, now in Colorado you have to make sure you do it right, or else — this is the crazy part — you get punished.
Businesses want to be able to higher high performers or those who the firm knows have other options and can demand a higher wage, which means they must pay them more than they would like to pay the average worker, so the ideal situation is to have multiple ranges, for example one for the average worker and one for the workers they really want to hire. So under this law they'd publish a big range, like this position pays between $X and $2X, but if the firm publishes that range, it makes the average worker think they can get 1.5X -- after all that's the average -- and then they become resentful when they are offered only X. In fact most workers would be upset that they are getting X.
Of course you could try to make a different job title -- e.g. Y and good-Y, and then say that Y pays X and good-Y pays 2X. But then you have to explain which job you are applying for and why you are not being promoted to good Y. It's a mess. Particularly in our current zeitgeist when there is an enormous amount of envy and obsession with equality, disclosing real salary ranges is guaranteed to generate lots of resentment and is the last thing the firm wants to do. And God forbid if the high performers are not perfectly distributed along whatever identity category is viewed as most critical, as then you could be open to lawsuits, etc. So think of this as the flipside of the UC System refusing to take SAT into consideration. UC doesn't want any objective measures as inputs for the same reason that firms don't want to disclose objective outputs. It's really the flipside of the same coin -- not wanting to offend those who insist there are no differences between groups by either refusing to collect the data or refusing to disclose the data, which if taken into consideration or disclosed would reveal that there are in fact differences between groups.
Now in some cases the firm is in an industry where there is not much difference in employee productivity just due to the nature of the job. If you are serving coffee, then a slow coffee server is not much different than a fast coffee server. Same thing for a property manager. Hospital nurses are generally not paid based on performance, it's so regulated. So in those cases you don't care, you can disclose. But in other cases it's not. So some firms will avoid CO and others wont. I suspect in most industries you do not see really big differences, and so most employers will be fine as they are in the hospital nurse/property manager bucket. But some wont be. E.g. in tech, there are big differences in productivity. Also in sales occupations, there are huge differences in productivity. It really depends on the occupation/industry. Similarly for education, while it may threaten the worldview of UC admins to look at SAT scores, it would not threaten the worldview of a community college to look at GED scores, and so community colleges can still take GED scores into account while preserving the we-are-all-the-same view just as the property management offices, health care admin, and coffee shops firms can disclose salary-ranges and not be vulnerable to charges of discrimination.
Of course these are all hypotheticals. If you want data, then look at which industries are the ones more likely to give CO a pass and then take a look at their compensation structures or what type of labor they are hiring to see which firms believe they will be faced with larger costs than other firms.
Then there is the issue of special-casing your HR processes for Colorado, which some firms may not find as being worth the hassle.
It’s only harmful because the people who privately compensate drastically differently on their private whims have the power to just move that pay around geographically. This protection would be much more effective if it wasn’t exploitable by capital mobility.
When hiring someone from Colorado, you follow Colorado's laws. When hiring someone from Michigan, you follow Michigan's laws.
It's not really that difficult for most companies to do this. There are plenty of companies that have offices in multiple states, countries and they follow the laws of the jurisdictions in which they do business.
You don't need an entire department to comply with local laws, usually you consult the services of an attorney in the respective jurisdiction or someone familiar with the laws of that jurisdiction and they let you know what you need to do to comply. Despite what you may often hear, getting advice from an attorney is not THAAT expensive.
This law is slightly different in that it’s about posting. So it’s more like if there is a possibility of hiring from Colorado consult an attorney and follow certain laws. That scales very differently from consulting an attorney after picking an employee from a specific jurisdiction.
Do you expect companies to roll their own credit payment systems? Or their own shipping? Hell, everyone already uses greenhouse and such for job postings anyways, why not let them handle it for you?
If IBM wants everyone to use their shitty internal application system but also not del with local laws, that’s on them, not on Colorado.
"The Act requires employers to include the hourly rate or salary compensation (or a range thereof) the employer is offering for the position. This compensation range may extend from the lowest to the highest pay the employer, in good faith, believes it may pay for the particular job."
If I was shotgunning? Absolutely. I don't know which end of that range I'm going to end up in, but unless 250k is too low for some reason, it's at worst basically the same information I had without the salary range.
Does anyone accept the bottom 1/2 of the range after posting that wide a range though? Suddenly instead of actually hiring for 85-250k, your juniors at the position want 175k and all seniors want 250k.
So that's why Oracle changed their job posting for a position my wife was trying to get in January.
Edit: Just spoke with her to get the details refreshed. She found the job posting in December, went through several wickets and then radio silence for a week. In January she was told, "Sorry this position isn't available to people in Colorado." Going back to the job posting it had that one change added to it.
> In response to a Colorado state law that requires employers post salary ranges in job postings, companies are simply refusing to consider applicants from the state.
Considering how attractive CO is for remote workers... this may just backfire on them.
On the other hand, states should really work together when passing laws like this. If CA had passed the same or similar requirement, I'm sure companies would just have eaten the bullet. CO alone is just a small fish.
Or you could look at this the other way around. Considering the relative power of e.g. remote tech workers combined with the allure of CO, with a little organizational muscle this could be an easy win to compel the smaller offenders to change their behavior.
Are they the tech workers who flooded California from every corner of the world?
Are they the migrant workers who flooded California to work in the largest agricultural state in the nation?
Are they the aspiring entertainers who flooded California to work in Hollywood?
Are they the idle rich who flooded California to own beach front property and price out the locals?
Are they the Oakies and dusty bowl farmers who flooded Calfornia after "ruining" their own states with poor land management?
Pray tell, who are these Calfornians who are looking to ruin other states? Because to me it looks like California was first on the list for everyone else to ruin.
Part of the beauty of the states having power is to be innovators. Federal laws will be the lowest bar possible, since it has to pass Congress and apply to all of the states.
The Colorado law gets a lot of press for requiring salary ranges on job postings, but the full law includes many more requirements:
> the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, a Colorado law signed in 2019 but that went into effect at the start of this year, in part requires all employers to immediately notify current employees of "promotional opportunities," provide a salary range and description of benefits on a job listing, as well as maintain records of job descriptions and compensation history for every employee. As part of this, regulators in Colorado decided that “An employer is required to ‘disclose in each posting for each job the hourly or salary compensation, or a range of hourly or the salary compensation, and a general description of all of the benefits and other compensation to be offered to the hired applicant.’” They also instituted rules about notifying current employees about promotion opportunities as part of new job postings.
None of these requirements are dealbreakers on their own, but the hurdle is now that your company must ensure they’re not violating any Colorado laws by simply advertising a remote position that someone in Colorado might read.
Colorado has only about 1.5% of the US population, so depending on the size of your company it might be easier to just exclude Colorado and avoid having to dedicate someone’s time to managing all of these rules just in case you might hire someone from Colorado.
As a worker, none of these seem objectionable to me. They seem positive. Maybe we should adopt them in more places where remote hiring pools are available and make this transparency available more broadly, bringing CO workers back into the fold in solidarity.
As an employer, many of these are a hassle that we’d rather just not deal with when there’s still great candidates from 49 other states we can choose from.
My point is that I'd like to adopt these policies more broadly so the cost is carried by employers, not workers. They're perfectly reasonable costs, I have solidarity with my fellow worker, I want the people who should actually pay the cost to do so, not people in the state that led the way.
But the "cost" seems to be business simply maintaining some reasonable documentation and records. Hardly a burden - since there is already a mountain of paperwork around hiring it's like this adds 2% more. Nothing. And if you're small your PEO will (likely) handle the whole thing.
Given my current experiences with an HR department, I shudder to think of the nightmare. Also, what about one-offs and negotiating specific terms? Does that get reported?
I mean, if you're looking fpr a way to make sure compensation only happens one way, it's this.
It also includes provisions about notifying current employees and such.
It sounds simple, but it can raise a lot of legal questions. For example, what qualifies as a “promotion opportunity”? Once you have to start running things past the lawyers just to make sure you’re not opening the company up to various new liabilities by simply posting a job offer, it becomes an issue.
It adds more than 2% overhead because you have to overhaul all of your processes to comply and have the lawyers and or HR review. Even if it did only add 2%, you’re only opening up to 1.5% of the US population.
Or you could... run new opportunities by your employees. If they feel qualified and motivated they’re also in a great position to help recruit replacement resources for their current role.
“We keep our hiring secret from our own employees to minimize their exposure to what we might offer them and now we have to pay lawyers to deceive them” is pitiful.
Just post salary ranges for open positions! If the position is vague or covers a wide range of experience, just post a wide range. Salary transparency is a very good thing, it empowers employees and is good for the industry overall.
Note that CA law requires employers to provide salary ranges upon request after any initial interview. So not knowing a salary range for a posted position is no excuse, unless you plan on excluding CA from your remote position as well.
Consider that sweatshop workers make 2 to 8 cents per garment, and "empowering" becomes that happy-clappy delusional utopia that it always was. It doesn't matter if employees are lowly managers or further down the ranks or subcontracted via vendors, they're all serfs the plutocrats won't give any power to voluntarily.
Why would anyone hiring anyone anywhere, much less across jurisdictions, not hire counsel? If you don’t you’re almost certainly exposing yourself to more legal risk.
This isn’t about legal costs, it’s about people who are accustomed to exploiting legal benefits in their favor being upset that one avenue is less advantageous for them. They’ll take their low risk stakes to another table and whine about the previous one in hopes the advantage will open back up for them there too.
I get why this seems like a big deal for tech workers who feel they ought to be able to work from anywhere they please, but I don’t think that some tech companies avoiding remote work in Colorado is that big of a deal for Coloradans in general. The vast majority of jobs are still local in nature, thus this transparency law will apply to all the jobs the vast majority of people in that state are interested in / eligible for. On the whole that seems like it’s still a big win.
When CEOs were required to disclose compensation, the income inequality gap only increased. If companies begin complying for remote postings I expect many will leverage remote opportunities in Colorado for higher pay in lower CoL areas.
In response to a Colorado state law that requires employers post salary ranges in job postings, companies are simply refusing to consider applicants from the state.
Now we need another ruling (and/or a massive class action lawsuit) striking down this tactic for the blatantly discriminatory practice that it is.
64 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadSuppose Colorado has a law saying that all new roles must be presented to current employees as promotional opportunities and then Michigan (hypothetically) passes a law saying that all new roles must be presented to students graduating from Michigan State first? These laws could be in direct conflict, so which state does the company pick?
Do you spin up entire HR and Legal departments just to make sure you're not violating laws in states in which you don't even have employees yet? The easiest thing to do is just say "this law is too complicated for us to deal with right now, so we've decided not to hire here." Worse, this kind of law gives a huge advantage to FAANG-type companies who _can_ afford such intricacies.
Laws which add costs to labor means that wages are going to be lower than if those costs weren't there. In a tight labor market that means employers have to go elsewhere, so more outsourcing or they cut back on labor employed. There is a reason why Europe has such high unemployment rates (and comparatively lower salaries) and struggles especially with youth employment. But they have much better worker protections. It's a tradeoff.
Now that doesn't mean it's not worth it to pass certain worker protections. But every such protection will have a cost in terms of reducing demand for labor. Maybe the cost is small and the benefit is high, in which case, go for it. But don't pretend that the costs aren't going to be paid if you federalize the law, or that there is some sort of legal arrangement you can make to outlaw economic tradeoffs. The costs will just be paid in a different way.
And it's not like everyone in Colorado is suddenly unemployed. Lots of people are hiring Colorado workers. It's just a small decrease in demand for Colorado labor in response to a small increase in employer headaches for hiring people in that state. If those who supported this law didn't expect exactly this to happen, then they were uninformed. I am assuming most people in Colorado knew this would happen and decided to pass the law anyway. Time will tell whether the benefits outweigh the costs, but there are always such tradeoffs.
Speaking about these issues as if they are "engineering tradeoffs" ignores that the status quo is not static and universal.
The only adversity inheritent to the employer/employee system is the same adversity inheritent to any buyer/seller relationship. Both want to extract the most from the other while providing the least. Sellers curse when it's a buyer's market and buyers curse when it's a seller's market, and buyers always want it to be a buyers market and vice versa. That's pretty normal and appears in every market, including the labor market. If you are buying flat screen TVs, you need to understand that the flatscreen TV makers are not your friend. They will charge as much as they possibly can. That doesn't mean you hate them, but if you feel personally wounded when they try to screw you over, then you are in for a life lesson. Be wary and avoid brand loyalties. The same with your employer. I don't think this is something I am trying to hide.
Sure, but your choice of work far dwarfs any other of those other transactions in its magnitude (and ongoing nature).
In an ideal world, if you want to make a job posting, you just put up the job posting. Instead, now in Colorado you have to make sure you do it right, or else — this is the crazy part — you get punished.
Businesses want to be able to higher high performers or those who the firm knows have other options and can demand a higher wage, which means they must pay them more than they would like to pay the average worker, so the ideal situation is to have multiple ranges, for example one for the average worker and one for the workers they really want to hire. So under this law they'd publish a big range, like this position pays between $X and $2X, but if the firm publishes that range, it makes the average worker think they can get 1.5X -- after all that's the average -- and then they become resentful when they are offered only X. In fact most workers would be upset that they are getting X.
Of course you could try to make a different job title -- e.g. Y and good-Y, and then say that Y pays X and good-Y pays 2X. But then you have to explain which job you are applying for and why you are not being promoted to good Y. It's a mess. Particularly in our current zeitgeist when there is an enormous amount of envy and obsession with equality, disclosing real salary ranges is guaranteed to generate lots of resentment and is the last thing the firm wants to do. And God forbid if the high performers are not perfectly distributed along whatever identity category is viewed as most critical, as then you could be open to lawsuits, etc. So think of this as the flipside of the UC System refusing to take SAT into consideration. UC doesn't want any objective measures as inputs for the same reason that firms don't want to disclose objective outputs. It's really the flipside of the same coin -- not wanting to offend those who insist there are no differences between groups by either refusing to collect the data or refusing to disclose the data, which if taken into consideration or disclosed would reveal that there are in fact differences between groups.
Now in some cases the firm is in an industry where there is not much difference in employee productivity just due to the nature of the job. If you are serving coffee, then a slow coffee server is not much different than a fast coffee server. Same thing for a property manager. Hospital nurses are generally not paid based on performance, it's so regulated. So in those cases you don't care, you can disclose. But in other cases it's not. So some firms will avoid CO and others wont. I suspect in most industries you do not see really big differences, and so most employers will be fine as they are in the hospital nurse/property manager bucket. But some wont be. E.g. in tech, there are big differences in productivity. Also in sales occupations, there are huge differences in productivity. It really depends on the occupation/industry. Similarly for education, while it may threaten the worldview of UC admins to look at SAT scores, it would not threaten the worldview of a community college to look at GED scores, and so community colleges can still take GED scores into account while preserving the we-are-all-the-same view just as the property management offices, health care admin, and coffee shops firms can disclose salary-ranges and not be vulnerable to charges of discrimination.
Of course these are all hypotheticals. If you want data, then look at which industries are the ones more likely to give CO a pass and then take a look at their compensation structures or what type of labor they are hiring to see which firms believe they will be faced with larger costs than other firms.
Then there is the issue of special-casing your HR processes for Colorado, which some firms may not find as being worth the hassle.
It's not really that difficult for most companies to do this. There are plenty of companies that have offices in multiple states, countries and they follow the laws of the jurisdictions in which they do business.
You don't need an entire department to comply with local laws, usually you consult the services of an attorney in the respective jurisdiction or someone familiar with the laws of that jurisdiction and they let you know what you need to do to comply. Despite what you may often hear, getting advice from an attorney is not THAAT expensive.
If IBM wants everyone to use their shitty internal application system but also not del with local laws, that’s on them, not on Colorado.
"The Act requires employers to include the hourly rate or salary compensation (or a range thereof) the employer is offering for the position. This compensation range may extend from the lowest to the highest pay the employer, in good faith, believes it may pay for the particular job."
https://leg.colorado.gov/sites/default/files/2019a_085_signe...
Edit: Just spoke with her to get the details refreshed. She found the job posting in December, went through several wickets and then radio silence for a week. In January she was told, "Sorry this position isn't available to people in Colorado." Going back to the job posting it had that one change added to it.
On the other hand, states should really work together when passing laws like this. If CA had passed the same or similar requirement, I'm sure companies would just have eaten the bullet. CO alone is just a small fish.
Are they the tech workers who flooded California from every corner of the world?
Are they the migrant workers who flooded California to work in the largest agricultural state in the nation?
Are they the aspiring entertainers who flooded California to work in Hollywood?
Are they the idle rich who flooded California to own beach front property and price out the locals?
Are they the Oakies and dusty bowl farmers who flooded Calfornia after "ruining" their own states with poor land management?
Pray tell, who are these Calfornians who are looking to ruin other states? Because to me it looks like California was first on the list for everyone else to ruin.
Yah, this is who I was referring to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27233073
> the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, a Colorado law signed in 2019 but that went into effect at the start of this year, in part requires all employers to immediately notify current employees of "promotional opportunities," provide a salary range and description of benefits on a job listing, as well as maintain records of job descriptions and compensation history for every employee. As part of this, regulators in Colorado decided that “An employer is required to ‘disclose in each posting for each job the hourly or salary compensation, or a range of hourly or the salary compensation, and a general description of all of the benefits and other compensation to be offered to the hired applicant.’” They also instituted rules about notifying current employees about promotion opportunities as part of new job postings.
None of these requirements are dealbreakers on their own, but the hurdle is now that your company must ensure they’re not violating any Colorado laws by simply advertising a remote position that someone in Colorado might read.
Colorado has only about 1.5% of the US population, so depending on the size of your company it might be easier to just exclude Colorado and avoid having to dedicate someone’s time to managing all of these rules just in case you might hire someone from Colorado.
I mean, if you're looking fpr a way to make sure compensation only happens one way, it's this.
It sounds simple, but it can raise a lot of legal questions. For example, what qualifies as a “promotion opportunity”? Once you have to start running things past the lawyers just to make sure you’re not opening the company up to various new liabilities by simply posting a job offer, it becomes an issue.
It adds more than 2% overhead because you have to overhaul all of your processes to comply and have the lawyers and or HR review. Even if it did only add 2%, you’re only opening up to 1.5% of the US population.
“We keep our hiring secret from our own employees to minimize their exposure to what we might offer them and now we have to pay lawyers to deceive them” is pitiful.
Note that CA law requires employers to provide salary ranges upon request after any initial interview. So not knowing a salary range for a posted position is no excuse, unless you plan on excluding CA from your remote position as well.
[1] https://nwlc.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/International-Pa...
I’m sure those salary ranges hide all sorts of nasty shit.
This isn’t about legal costs, it’s about people who are accustomed to exploiting legal benefits in their favor being upset that one avenue is less advantageous for them. They’ll take their low risk stakes to another table and whine about the previous one in hopes the advantage will open back up for them there too.
Now we need another ruling (and/or a massive class action lawsuit) striking down this tactic for the blatantly discriminatory practice that it is.