pay transparency Archives - Levy Employment Law

10

February, 2023

Pay Transparency Laws Can Help Workers, But Not in the Way Advertised

Led by the rationale proffered by legislatures in support of pay transparency laws, I have been thinking about them from the wrong perspective. Promoted as a means of closing the gender wage gap, I have been vocal in my criticisms that the laws will be of little or no effect for two key reasons. First, because they do not get to the root problems that produce most of the pay gap, as I discussed in this blog article. Second, because even where they provide useful information for negotiations, they do not overcome the tendency of certain groups to “undersell” themselves.

Reflection on their efficacy is important, because the laws are proliferating and the existing versions are already being tweaked. Less than three months after it took effect, New York City is considering amending its pay transparency law, partly to align with the New York State version of the law, and partly to capture forms of compensation beyond base salary. The city’s proposed amendments to the law will not do anything to address its deficiencies in resolving the gender pay gap.

Connecticut, on the other hand, currently has an earlier version of pay transparency, which requires employers to disclose salary ranges to job applicants during the hiring process. The state is considering amending the law to align with the approach in New York, California, and Colorado, and require that salary ranges appear in job postings. That is a distinction with a difference. Not so much for the gender pay gap problem, but relative to the new way in which I am considering the benefits of pay transparency.

Reconsider Pay Transparency as Serving a Different Beneficial Purpose

How are pay transparency laws helpful to U.S. workers? Sometimes you need to consider things from a different perspective. The aha moment for me was in the epilogue of Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Nickel and Dimed, which I recently had the opportunity to read. Reflecting on her own experience as a journalist undercover, temporarily occupying the space of a low-wage worker, Ehrenreich observed that her coworkers in those positions had little opportunity to comparison shop for higher-paying positions.

Time is money, transportation is money, and when you have little or no money saved, you cannot afford to hop between multiple employers and interview processes. You only go to as many places as it takes to land a job, even if it is not the best job.

We Don’t Talk Much About Money

Friends and family may provide few insights into other work opportunities because, at all levels of society, most people tend not to say how much they are paid. This was illustrated last month, when The New York Times ran a Sunday feature on people’s compensation, “27 People on the Streets of New York Talk About How Much They Make.” They reported that most of the people they stopped on the streets (nearly 400 were asked) declined to speak with them on the record about how much they earned.

Similarly, from the employer’s perspective, I suspect my own approach is similar to that of most small business owners. Even this past year when I knew pay transparency laws were on the horizon I did not list pay in my job postings. In my interviews with candidates, pay is usually one of the last points covered, and only if I am asked. But why is that? I have done benchmarking and believe I am paying on the higher end for the roles I am filling. And yet I have historically hidden that fact. I could say I wanted people to work for me because they were interested in the work and not the money. While true, I am not sure that was my motive. Rather, I think I am just reticent to talk about pay, worried that my benchmarking is wrong, or that I am planning to offer too much and should pay less. I hedge as long as I can before committing to compensation to reassure myself that I am not overpaying the person or, if I am, that it is because they are a great candidate and worth the investment.

Comparison Shopping Is a Valuable Benefit

Overcoming that reticence and secrecy to allow for “comparison shopping” is how pay transparency laws can make a difference for workers. Imagine if every help wanted ad in the paper or online included a wage range. Employers would be disinclined to inflate that number, lest too many of their current employees start to question their pay, and they would not want to lowball it too much, lest they lose out on attracting the best candidates.

How valuable would it be for people who are barely getting by financially to have salary information for dozens of open jobs at their fingertips? They could quickly pinpoint the highest paying opportunities and prioritize applying for those. Would that equalize pay between men and women, or between individuals of different races? I am not sure that it would for the various reasons I have covered in prior articles. But it sure might help those at the bottom rungs of the pay scale do just a little bit better. Over time those incremental differences can mean the difference between paying for food, shelter, clothing and transportation, versus having to forego one or more basic necessities.

For low wage workers, then, there is a benefit to pay transparency laws. And for any worker the laws force disclosure of data that allows for some degree of benchmarking and comparative analysis, which can help inform wage negotiations. But at more skilled, higher-level positions, the compensation range for posted positions tends to get wider, so the comparative data is less helpful.

New York City’s Newest Contemplated Changes Will Not Help

Currently, New York City only requires employers to disclose base salary, not incentive compensation or commissions. The City Council is considering amendments to the law that would require inclusion of the job description, which would make the law consistent with New York State’s pay transparency law that takes effect in September 2023. The amendments would also require employers to describe the non-salary or non-wage compensation for the position, including bonuses, benefits, stocks, bonds, options and equity or ownership. All that additional data will make for a mighty long (and pricey) job posting for employers, and in my experience those non-wage factors can encompass so many variables that the information employers include in their postings in response to such a mandate will be of little value to applicants.

Rather than bog down employers with further mandates and clutter their job postings to such a degree that the most useful information gets lost in the fine print, local and state governments would be better served in recognizing the value of mandating pay transparency in job postings simply as to base salary. For those who lack the time and resources to interview widely or otherwise collect comparative pay data, it could be invaluable. As for solving the gender pay gap, move past the quick fix window-dressing of pay transparency. Instead, consider the societal changes needed to really make a difference.

By Tracey I. Levy

8

December, 2022

Is Pay Transparency Just Legislators Throwing Arrows at a Dartboard, Missing the Root Problem

What if all these new legislative initiatives at pay transparency are solving the wrong problem? Touted as a solution to pay inequity, a recent study lends much reason to question the viability of that approach. And from personal experience as a “big law” associate, I know that “transparency” is not always as clear as it may seem.

Can Pay Transparency Hit the Bull’s-Eye?

I have been having a lot of conversations about this subject recently. I have spoken with reporters, some “on background” and some for articles in which I have actually been quoted, conversed with colleagues about how we think the latest laws will play out, and had thorny practical discussions with my clients who are struggling to understand just what they need to do in order to be in compliance with laws that are incredibly localized when their recruiting area is incredibly diffuse. I am particularly proud of and grateful for my recent conversations, posted in Forbes.com (New Wage Transparency Law Has Overlooked Problems and Why Your Company May Need A ‘No Haggle’ Rule) with award-winning author, coach, mentor and researcher of the secrets to professional success Dr. Ruth Gotian. All these conversations are driven by recent legal changes, which in certain jurisdictions now mandate that employers disclose and in some instances affirmatively and publicly publish, the range of what they are willing to pay for any particular job opening.

I have read commentary from many others, including colleagues who I hold in high esteem, on this very same subject. And there is one statistic that I found buried in the midst of a recent article published by SHRM that has me feeling more discouraged than ever and wondering whether legislators are simply throwing arrows at a dartboard and hoping for a bull’s-eye.

Clarifying the Cause and Meaning of “Pay Inequity”

The federal government statistics we use when we refer to a pay equity gap are based on the average earnings of individuals in various demographic categories, without controlling for related business factors. Payscale has reported that when controlled for job responsibilities, education and experience, women earn 99 cents for every dollar earned by a man, and the pay disparities among men of different races similarly only differ within the range of a penny.

So do we have a serious pay inequity problem? Job responsibilities, education and experience have long been recognized as entirely legitimate, nondiscriminatory factors that may be considered in making employment decisions. While facially non-discriminatory, factors such as education can also be misused as a proxy that excludes or marginalizes individuals of color who otherwise possess abundant performance potential. But absent statistical proof of a disparate impact, and evidence undermining the legitimacy of the criterion applied, our legal system does not recognize differences in treatment based on those factors to be evidence of discrimination. And if differences in pay based on education, job responsibilities, and experience are widely recognized to be lawful, then what is it that we expect pay transparency will achieve?

Back in the Day…Lessons from Personal Experience

Back when I was an associate at a large law firm, I took comfort in the lockstep pay scale that governed my first eight years with the firm. It was my law school graduation date that determined how much I would be paid, and I knew the same was true for the other men and women associates in the offices surrounding me.

There are of course a few deviations even in the most lockstep of systems, and in law firms associates may be told they are taking a step back by a year or two in the pay scale based on intervening work experience before joining the firm that may not directly relate to the work of the department with which they are now associated. But it was all transparent, or seemingly so, and I never had reason to question whether I was being paid differently as a woman.

I made a conscious choice relatively early in my large law firm career to scale back my work schedule, first to allow for advanced legal studies and then to care for my children, and my compensation continued along the lockstep track but with a proportionate reduction that aligned to my reduced billable hours commitment. That too was transparent and I was and remain so grateful for the opportunity I was given to continue my career with the firm in that capacity.

But all was not quite as transparent as it seemed. I had a 1200 hour per year billable expectation, and I made it my business to meet and usually exceed that billable target every single year. My compensation was in line with that target. What was less apparent was that some associates who were classified as full-time employees, and therefore expected to meet a 2000 hour per year billable target, did not consistently achieve their objective. I know anecdotally from my work over the years with other large law firms that those who fall regularly short of the billable hours target receive taps on the shoulder and a nudge to secure alternative employment outside of the firm. There is only so long that they are carried on a more lucrative financial wave than that which applied to people like me who worked (and were paid) for a part-time schedule.

So I know firsthand what pay transparency looks and feels like, and I know it not to be a panacea that achieves true equality. The point that stymies me is that if our societal problem pertains to differences in pay that align to differences in the type of work we are performing, the training we received before engaging in that work, and the years of experience we have developed, then how on earth is pay transparency going to change that societal problem? It feels instead like additional window dressing to claim we are solving a problem when what actually we are doing is likely to have little or no impact.

Let’s Name the Real Problems

As a step in a forward direction, I suggest we begin by naming our actual problems:

One:

Women and certain marginalized groups are more likely to take jobs that fall on the lower end of the overall societal pay scale. As a result, their lifetime earnings are likely to be less than those of white men.

Two:

Women and certain marginalized groups are less likely to accrue as much seniority in the jobs that they take because life factors may necessitate their temporary exit from the job market, or their experiences at work may be such that they eventually choose to leave, often for less lucrative positions, rather than stick it out in an environment where they do not fully feel they belong.

We Need Different/Better Solutions

The existence of these specific problems is not new news. But the laws on pay transparency seem entirely irrelevant to solving them. Instead, we need to take several reflective steps back as a society. We need to give serious thought to whether we are under-compensating people for caretaker and other types of roles that currently fall on the lower end of the pay spectrum. Supply and demand helps to drive wages, but so does the government, and reimbursement rates for child care, elder care services, and preschool education that leave people just above the poverty level send a message that we are looking to do these things on the cheap and do not place as much value on them as a society.

As for our workplaces, our laws against harassment and discrimination can really only go so far. My earliest exposures in corporate America to what was then entitled diversity and inclusion initiatives was greatly underwhelming. They felt like lip service, comprised of special recognition days and a handful of guest speakers over the course of a 12 month period and I could not imagine how any of that made those who were under represented feel wanted and included. But D&I has evolved to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, and more recently I have had the good fortune to work with many talented, insightful leaders who are pressuring organizations to turn a mirror on themselves, to look at the composition of their workforces to consider whether those align with the organization’s values, to search for where people may be discouraged from applying or may choose to leave before they or the organization have been able to enjoy the benefits of their contributions, and to develop creative solutions. I regularly tell DEIB professionals that I do not envy their jobs. To be effective, they must lead a course of soul-searching, break down systems, analyze their component parts, and get buy-in to effectuate change.

I applaud the objective of getting us to a point in society where we all feel valued and appropriately compensated for the work that we do. But no wave of a magic legislative wand is going to get us there. Let’s instead buckle down at each of our organizations, partner with those who are developing some expertise in this area, roll up our sleeves and get to work.

By Tracey I. Levy

24

October, 2022

Mandated Pay Transparency – the Public Posting of Salaries Being Offered – Is Imminent in NYC and CA

At the onset of the pandemic, when businesses were being shut down, new government edicts were materializing by the hour and it felt like the world had turned on its head, I heard from a great many clients, each trying in their own way to sort through the confusion. There was a level of chaos then that I hope never again to experience at quite that level in my professional career.

But I have advised and managed through other inflection points – times at which a jurisdiction (most typically NYC, thank you to my home stomping grounds) has rolled out a substantial change in employment laws that, while covered in advance by lots of law firms and journalists, still caught many employers by surprise. The advent of paid sick leave did that – with rules and guidance issued by the city literally at the eleventh hour before the effective date and employers that already had some form of paid sick leave benefit scratching their heads to discern how what they offered met (or more often did not meet) all that the new law required. And years before that it was the laws prohibiting smoking in the workplace – something that has now become a fairly standard workplace norm was radically shocking when it rolled out, with exceptions for private enclosed office spaces, signage mandates and a plethora of legislative compromises.

We are again at one of those inflection points, and this time the target is employer’s hiring practices. Next week New York City employers will face round one of the change, as November 1 brings with it a mandate that every job posting for a position that could be filled in the city (including by a remote worker) must specify the wage or job range for the position. That mandate takes effect in Westchester County on November 6 and for the entire state of California on January 1.

January 1 also will bring round two to New York City – a requirement that the myriad tools employers may now be deploying for their hiring practices undergo anti-bias testing and that those results, plus a plethora of other information, be made public on employers’ websites and through various notice requirements to job applicants. These requirements will cover the most basic of AI tools, like those that perform key word searches to help filter through (and reject) stacks of job applicants, to far more sophisticated systems that rate candidates’ suitability relative to designated hiring criteria or even conduct and analyze video interviews of prospective applicants.

One client recently commented that this is the full job security for recruiters law, and at least in the short-term it may be. New York City seems to place far greater faith in the unbiased (or at least more modestly scaled) feedback of recruiters and hiring managers than it does in technology that can be programmed to whittle applicant pools down to the choicest of candidates in the blink of an eye.

I have been writing and speaking of these legal changes for months and want to call out some of the resources you can reference for additional information.

For background on the basic elements of the pay transparency laws, see page 1 of Takeaways from Summer 2022. For similar background on the AI law, see page 5 of Takeaways from Winter 2021/22. And for the Westchester County piece of this, see my most recent posting on the WHRMA blog.
More in-depth articles that we have posted on each of these subjects for the Levy Employment Law blog include: NYC pay transparency law, NYC pay transparency guidance, AI tools, and pending NYS pay transparency legislation.
For some of the collateral consequences employers should be anticipating from pay transparency, see my Forbes interview with award-winning executive coach and author Dr. Ruth Gotian, and my more recent interview for the Employment Law column of SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management.
For the broader context of how pay transparency aligns with the 50-year history of pay equity initiatives in the U.S., our firm delivered a continuing legal education program with the Federal Bar Association and MyLawCLE that can be accessed here.

And there are more articles to come, as we help our clients work through the practical applications and implications of these laws. I have been thinking through a range of options employers may wish to consider for their own organizations that get ahead of the pay transparency issue. Yes, a pay equity audit is a good start – as so many legal practitioners have been advising – because the first step in solving a problem is knowing whether one exists. But options and opportunities go well beyond that initial step.

Also, there is the nagging question of whether any of this new legislation actually is addressing the right problem. There is reason to believe it is not, but also options (albeit challenging ones) for how to truly get to the thorny underlying issues. Keep checking with me as we explore those ideas, and please consult employment counsel if you have any questions about how the new hiring laws apply to your organization.

By Tracey I. Levy

16

June, 2022

Beyond Job Postings, New York State Pay Transparency Laws Would Create a Foundation for Massive Employee Pay Data and Pay History Collection

Two bills passed by both houses of the New York State legislature and currently awaiting submission to the governor for signature add a new, and significant, dimension to the range of pay transparency laws that are proliferating around the country. Starting from the most public version of pay transparency requirements in the context of individual job postings, these laws impose substantial data retention and reporting requirements that may have widespread implications for future assessment of the equitableness of employers’ pay practices.

Pay Transparency in Job Postings

The first pending New York State law follows the model of New York City and Colorado in that it will require employers to disclose in their job postings the proposed wage or range of wages that would be paid for an advertised job, promotion or transfer opportunity. The law will prohibit employers from refusing to interview, hire, promote, employ, or otherwise retaliate against an applicant or employee for that individual’s exercise of rights under the pay transparency law.

Where the law is more expansive than others is in two respects. First, it additionally requires employers to include the job description in their posting or advertisement, if a description exists. Second, and building on that requirement, the law expressly requires employers to retain:

a history of the compensation ranges for each job, promotion or transfer opportunity; and
the job descriptions for those positions.

While the pay transparency law will not require employers to report or otherwise collectively disclose that compensation history, another law passed by the state legislature and pending the governor’s signature will, if adopted, expand employee compensation reporting requirements for employers.

Equal Pay Disclosures – State Contractors

Described as relating to equal pay disclosure for state contractors, this second pending law will require contractors to submit reports that include a summary of their “workforce pay averages” (a term not defined by the legislation), which are to be calculated by job category, gender, race and ethnicity, and also report the percentage difference between pay averages in each category. Businesses with 100 or fewer employees would be exempt from the pay disclosure reporting requirement.

The pending law makes clear that it does not mean to impose a mere paperwork exercise. Rather, various state government leaders are to receive annual reports related to the information gleaned from the reports. All the reports are required to be available to the public for inspection and copying, redacting only individual employee names and social security numbers that may have been included. Further, all government agencies that have retained government contractors are required, “where practicable, feasible and appropriate,” to assess the equal pay practices of contractors submitting bids or proposals to be awarded a state contract.

Implications if New York State’s Pay Transparency Initiatives Become Law

There are substantial, and valid, considerations motivating this drive toward greater wage transparency, as we have discussed in past blog articles and in an interview I did with Dr. Ruth Gotian for Forbes.com. And there also is reason to question whether these laws will actually achieve their intended objective of wage parity. Will arming applicants and employees with more information be sufficient to overcome differences in negotiating style (that often correlate with gender and racial differences, whether that be attributable to natural proclivities, defensive techniques developed in response to unconscious bias, or other factors)?

If signed into law, these new legislative requirements pull employers into the center of a massive experiment. Historical data that employers are required to gather and retain provides a ready source of new information that plaintiffs’ lawyers can likely obtain through discovery and utilize in support of legal claims. And it is not a far leap to anticipate subsequent legislation that requires employers to publicly report, publish or analyze the data that they will soon be required to collect and retain. The proposed equal pay disclosure law for state contractors already exemplifies that approach.

Pay transparency laws, particularly in a state like New York where employees have a protected right to discuss salary information with one another, will invite probing questions from existing employees who suddenly learn they are far lower on the pay scale than they had realized. Already HR colleagues have reported that they are fielding these types of inquiries as to rationale and pressure to boost pay for certain employees. Employers that have not holistically evaluated their compensation philosophy, methodology and baseline data, and those employers that do not currently have well-defined roles that align with detailed job descriptions and salary bands, may face serious employee relations issues, or worse, under pay transparency mandates.

In New York State, the earliest any of these laws will take effect is November 1, 2022. Perhaps a pay audit and equity analysis as a summer project?

By Tracey I. Levy