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New law bans California employers from asking applicants their prior salary

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Re: New law bans California employers from asking applicants their prior salary

#481

Post by gyrgtyn »

chollida1 wrote: post #3

> The goal is to narrow the gender wage gap. If a woman is paid less than a man doing the same job and a new employer bases her pay on her prior salary, gender discrimination can be perpetuated, the bill’s backers say. Hmm, I'd never thought about that angle,but I guess it makes sense. No word on if they are allowed to use Equifax, etc to pull salary data from? EDIT: looking at the bill it looks like querying Equifax…

Same law getting passed all at once in multiple places: makes me wonder if (bigger) companies with access to government figured out some angle on this.

Re: New law bans California employers from asking applicants their prior salary

#482

Post by lr »

There is a simple solution to the salary problem... Make salaries public. “You can’t make private firms publish salary data,” you may say. True, but local, state, and the federal government can say that any business that does business with them must publish all salaries. The only way to make wages fair is to expose them to the light of day.

Re: New law bans California employers from asking applicants their prior salary

#483

Post by ericd »

gehwartzen wrote: post #448
ericd wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt most employers would go for that, but I suppose it's possible. More importantly, though, it'd also be much harder than getting it from a payroll provider.

According to wiki they have 225 million employment records and according to The Work Number they are used by 82% of Fortune 500 employers. Then they turn around and sell all that data while telling the participating companies what a wonderful service they are providing them by offloading this task from traditional HR. It's crazy.

Oh, wow, that is crazy.

Re: New law bans California employers from asking applicants their prior salary

#484

Post by kamaal »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #430
ryan_lane wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving jobs is the best way to get a large pay increase, especially if you're underpaid in your current job. Once you tell them how much you currently make, you've screwed yourself. This is a negotiating tactic used by employers to know how much they'll set as their upper bound for pay. Your employer may have strict pay bounds set, but a lot of places don't. The pay can vary highly between candidates, especially if t…

> Once you tell them how much you currently make, you've screwed yourself. This is the truth. When I finished my CS degree and started looking for work, I had a recruiter tell me I shouldn't expect any pay over my previous job, and since my previous job was a software testing internship for $12.75/hr, I shouldn't expect more than $15/hr or so. I said "Yeah, no. I'm not taking a software engineering job for barely ove…

In India, your resume qualifies for interview only if you disclose your previous salary.

I don't think its mandated by law, but thats's how the system works anyway.

Re: New law bans California employers from asking applicants their prior salary

#485

Post by lr »

MarkPNeyer wrote: post #410
geebee wrote: post #60

I'd prefer to see this go in the other direction and make all salary information public. Right now, employers have far more information than employees, and I don't think this law will do much to change that. To me, it's similar to real estate - imagine if only sellers had access to the database of exactly what every house sold for and when, but buyers had to go with unsubstantiated, scattered rumors. Or vise versa. T…

You don't need to attach names - just job titles should be sufficient to dramatically reduce the information asymmetry.

All salaries for everyone should be public. Come up with whatever excuse you want, and it can be countered. And I am a socialist, not a libertarian. The more data that comes to light, the more we will have equality for equal work.

Re: New law bans California employers from asking applicants their prior salary

#486

Post by CamelCaseName »

lr wrote: post #482

There is a simple solution to the salary problem... Make salaries public. “You can’t make private firms publish salary data,” you may say. True, but local, state, and the federal government can say that any business that does business with them must publish all salaries. The only way to make wages fair is to expose them to the light of day.

I suspect that any medium-large company would simply spin off a tiny firm that solely works with the government.

They could then contract out as much as possible, including some of the development, back to the parent company.

The net effect would be that you have a handful of project manager salaries in the public eye at the cost of an additional step in the procurement process.

Re: New law bans California employers from asking applicants their prior salary

#487

Post by lr »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #486
lr wrote: post #482

There is a simple solution to the salary problem... Make salaries public. “You can’t make private firms publish salary data,” you may say. True, but local, state, and the federal government can say that any business that does business with them must publish all salaries. The only way to make wages fair is to expose them to the light of day.

I suspect that any medium-large company would simply spin off a tiny firm that solely works with the government. They could then contract out as much as possible, including some of the development, back to the parent company. The net effect would be that you have a handful of project manager salaries in the public eye at the cost of an additional step in the procurement process.

Salaries are public in Finland. Fines are based on your salary, which is how it should be. Making a lot of money affords you many things. Getting out of feeling the pain of wrongdoing should not be one of them. Just one of the many benefits of public salary data.

Re: New law bans California employers from asking applicants their prior salary

#488

Post by rcyeh »

icelancer wrote: post #367
tiggybear wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we had more equality, which would be a result of forcing all salary info to be public, you wouldn't have to worry as much about being robbed.

That would not be the result of publishing salary information. It might be a drop in the bucket for equality at best. And you're speaking to someone who consistently votes and donates to democratic socialist candidates and causes.

In particular, publishing executive salary information has been blamed for fueling an arms race in executive pay [0], and by inference, inequality.

As a thought experiment, if we were to add everyone else's information, it's not clear to me that everyone would come out as a winner.

[0]: https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/more-transparency-mo...

Re: New law bans California employers from asking applicants their prior salary

#489

Post by jakeogh »

That's what CA needs... more laws.

Lawyers: what are the chances this goes to the Supreme Court? I suspect next to none, since it's just CA, and employers don't care enough about free speech to fight it.

Silver lining: Another straw in the pile to split CA.

Re: New law bans California employers from asking applicants their prior salary

#490

Post by [deleted] »

conanbatt wrote: post #472
wildmusings wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and excellence is not rewarded in such societies. Edit: Look at how pay works in countries where such information is public (i.e. Scandinavia). My understanding is that within a given line of work, everyone makes just about the same amount, adjusted for seniority, regardless of performance.

This happens also in germany and spain and europe in general. Its just america that pays so damn much for developers, because of the competing capital. Price transparency is definitely not harming employees, and its also not harming companies in the long run.

[deleted]
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