Recent changes to workplace regulations in three states have placed a unique demand on employers– requiring salary postings. This widespread development supposedly signals a shift towards an agenda of equalizing wages and reducing instances of wage discrimination by requiring that salaries be posted publicly, but there is clearly more to the story.
It has been a long running debate among conservatives whether the liberal lawmakers are making laws to actually solve issues or simply uncover problems with hidden motives. On one side of the conversation, many liberals champion the supposed new law that requires employers to post salaries in job advertisements as an important step for curbing discrimination. However, it raises questions about why this wasn’t a requirement before and whether or not this was to encourage people to go back to work because many were not. I guess we will never really know the truth.
Daily Wire reports, on January 1, three state-level laws requiring employers to list salary ranges in job listings went into effect.
California, Washington, and Rhode Island now require prospective employees to provide payment information. According to an analysis by job listing platform Indeed, approximately 71% of companies already post pay ranges in job postings.
A summary of Senate Bill 1162 in California requires employers to provide employees with “the pay scale for the position in which they are currently employed” on request, while employers with 15 or more workers must include “the pay scale for the position in any job posting.”
A new law requires companies, including Disney, Uber, Apple, and others, to submit pay data reports to the state’s Civil Rights Department, including “the median and mean hourly rate for each combination of race, ethnicity, and sex within each job category.”
According to the text of the Equal Pay and Opportunities Act in Washington, it says employers must “disclose in each posting for each job opening the wage scale or salary range, and a general description of all of the benefits and other compensation to be offered.”
Supporters of salary transparency legislation assert that offering pay information reduces disparities and encourages more applications.
Research from Harvard University, on the other hand, found that salary transparency laws reduce overall wages by 2% under some circumstances as “employers credibly refuse to pay high wages to any one worker to avoid costly renegotiations with others under transparency.
As the job market reels from a low supply of workers, the new pay transparency legislation takes effect. After the lockdown-induced recession, labor force participation failed to recover, worsening decades-long trends of declining engagement.
It seems suspicious that liberals are suddenly making a push for people in their cities to go back to work. After all, during the pandemic they provided incentives that allowed people to stay home and take advantage of generous tax-payer funded welfare payments. Now they’re pretending like they care about the rights of workers with this ‘anti-discrimination law.’ This begs the question: have these liberal lawmakers finally realized their policies created a dependency on government handouts and now need a way out? Or is this just another distraction from how far left some cities have gone? Either way, it’s an obvious attempt by these politicians to make up for their role in creating this mess in the first place.
Let’s continue this conversation, in the comments below.
