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California jobs required to post pay range starting 2023 (ca.gov)
43 points by joe-collins on Sept 27, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 32 comments



It's been nice seeing the pay range for remote jobs added to postings, even if they claim the range is only valid in Colorado. Even if pay is somewhat different elsewhere (it probably shouldn't be for remote), at least you know if you're in a Major League ballpark or the local YMCA dirt lot. I did recently see a job posting by IBM that stated that Colorado applicants could email a particular email address, attesting that they're a Colorado resident who plans to apply for a particular position, and then they'd reply back with the range. Wondering if that attempt at information hiding complies with Colorado law or not. If more states add this requirement, workarounds for companies to hide the data will become cumbersome.


I've recently seen that many job postings do include pay ranges. However, they only provide the base wage range; joining bonuses and stock grants are not included. I don't believe that this bill requires employers to report the full range of pay.


Stock grants and bonuses aren’t guaranteed to be worth anything. On the flip side someone who joined a company at the right time (pre-covid?) might have a stock grant worth much more than a new hire.


Honestly employers have been kneecapping themselves with this. E.g. Google job posts usually post base salary for L3 even if the listing is obviously for L5/L6. The total comp is like 2.5x the advertised amount. Why wouldn't they try to put the biggest number they can get away with?


> Why wouldn't they try to put the biggest number they can get away with?

They don’t need to, people already know.


> Why wouldn't they try to put the biggest number they can get away with

It is unusual in a negotiation to offer to pay the largest amount possible as your opening bid - they do it so they can pay the smallest number they can get away with.

If there is someone amazing that they want to pay $25mil to - they wouldnt be advertising the role.


Although I see the appeal of this, the MAJOR flaw is that California allowed a private right of action, unlike the Colorado law.

It’s inevitable that lawyers will weaponize this as a new source of revenue, just like patent trolls and ADA lawsuits do with copy and paste lawsuits. And those lawsuits will disproportionately fall on smaller companies without in-house lawyers and the resources to fight them, just like they have with ADA lawsuits and patent trolls.


What difference does it make if the pay range is far greater than the inequity of actual pay gap?


This is a step in the right direction for equitable pay.

Ideally would include full compensation be posted though, stocks, etc.


What is equitable pay?


Places swanky enough to offer stocks and benefits.

The idea that all are equally lined up against the wall for quick execution. Typically happens at swanky/rich companies leading up to more “equity/inclusion” pushed down your throat.


Equitable pay is pay both the employer and the employee mutually agree upon.

Everything else is agenda-based.


I'm pretty sure that's the point the parent was trying to illustrate.

"Equitable pay" is a merely a political narrative for left leaning audiences - postmodernist talking points always require victims, after all.


The idea that labour has no intrinsic value beyond what the market commands is a postmodernist construct.


I would posit the flip side actually, Marx's take that labor has inherent latent value, and its products are the sum of the latent value, which in no way correlates to market pricing is the type of infallible argument that postmodernism thrives on.

You can spend this afternoon whittling two by fours down into toothpicks as a real world demonstration of this.


Marx is a modernist philosopher by definition. It seems to me you don't really understand what modernism and postmodernism is.


I suspect you're missing the forest for the tree, re labor theory of value.


I'm really not. The core of postmodernism is rejecting metanarratives. The LTV is far older than Marx and Marx was deathly opposed to the relativism and philosophical nihilism that postmodern philosophy would run with in the future. He was anything but postmodern. His arguments were classical modernist arguments modeled after Hegel.


People have been arguing for "equitable pay" since before the word 'postmodernist' ever entered the English lexicon. In general, equitable pay for a job would entail that no two people are paid differently on the basis of certain characteristics we might deem irrelevant (and this basket of characteristics varies depending on who you ask).

Further, economists, political scientists, and philosophers alike have written on the topic of what is equitable in a capitalist economy, and in terms of distributive justice; there are very few people who would define equitability as the mere existence of an agreement between parties, including the legal system (for example, some contracts can and are deemed unconscionable, and selling organs or oneself into slavery are illegal).


You're conflating "equal" and "equitable". The latter of the two is along the lines of "fair" - a fully nebulous term in this context; its entire raison d'être is to push agenda narratives.

The idea of equitable outcomes is a common law concept used for things like contract breach remedies, which is again something that the great-grand-parent touched up on.

That is, it's an idea used for compensation when one party walks away from a mutual agreement - the logical implication is that mutual agreements are equitable, which is why compensation is needed to re-establish that state upon a breach.


>the logical implication is that mutual agreements are equitable

But nobody uses 'equitable' in this sense, as people have a variety of reasons to engage in a mutual agreement, where upon asked one or even both parties would agree that the agreement isn't 'equitable' or fair. To say that mutual agreements are equitable is only because of the assumption that the agreement wouldn't have occured or been accepted if the agreement isn't equitable - which is obviously false, given that people agree to heavily unfair (though not unconscionable) contracts all the time.


> no two people are paid differently on the basis of certain characteristics we might deem irrelevant

Who is the “we” deeming those characteristics as relevant? This entails legislators creating a central list of job characteristics, doesn’t it?


I'm not (yet) talking about the law; a prerequisite to law (among other things) is rational deliberation among the members of society. The "we" is every party interested in constructing social norms.


Can you give me an example of how it would be implemented?


Isn’t all pay mutually agreed upon? No one ever forced me to take a job. In the USA that is known as slavery.


How do you post compensation through stocks?

Base salary: $150,000-$200,000 Stock compensation: $0 to >$1M

Is that helpful?


Absolutely. Base pay is guaranteed, and the only thing to really consider about 'money in hand'. Bonuses or stock grants _could be worth up to blah_ but could also be zero as your range mentions. So effectively, $0 until 'in hand'.

Listing the base salary is immensely helpful to determine if the job is worth your time and the effort the company wants based on the JD. Problem becomes when their range starts showing BS crap like $20/k - $350k yr. That is meaningless and not helpful.


Pay ranges are often not helpful because there's no standard for which jobs are a "single role". For example tech companies are often mandated to post ranges for H1B positions, but they can get away posting unhelpful things like "the pay range is $50k-$900k".

Far more useful, in the tech industry at least, is to look at websites that show you pay ranges specific to the job level. For example:

https://levels.fyi


Levels mixes location which kind of sucks - for example, Google’s non-negotiated pay bands for entry level are 220k - 157k depending on location. That’s an incredibly wide gap - > the standard US citizens salary. Levels takes the average of those numbers so the usefulness dwindles.


Good


In my experience pay is not a good proxy for the value an employee brings to a company or society.

I think society would be better with pay based on the job description for most jobs vs. the company or the individual employee.


On the other hand, pay does tend to be a good proxy for whether I can afford rent and groceries, so it's not entirely without interest.




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