Do you know if your job is paying you fairly?
If you work in California, big changes to the law next year will empower you with more salary data to answer that question.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) recently signed a bill that requires California employers with 15 or more workers to provide a salary range on all job postings – and share that information with current employees. Other states, including Colorado, Nevada, Connecticut, and Washington, have passed similar legislation.
But California’s law also requires companies with 100 or more employees in the state to annually report detailed salary information, such as median gender and racial pay gaps. The state is home to many major corporations, such as Google, Meta, Apple and Oracle.
One expert told The Washington Post that the law is “the strongest legislative effort for pay transparency in the U.S. to date.”
“For employees, this legislation takes a good part of the guessing game out of pay negotiations and levels the playing field in such negotiations,” Peter Bamberger, a scholar with the Academy of Management and a professor in the Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv University, told The Post.
California’s Equal Pay Act already prohibits employers from paying employees of differing sex, race or ethnicity less than others for performing “substantially similar work.”
And with more data coming online next year, employees may find it easier to prove their bosses are violating the law.
According to the Society of Human Resource Management, the annual detailed pay report for companies with 100-plus employees must include the number of employees by race, ethnicity and sex whose annual earnings fall within each of the pay bands used by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Occupational Employment Statistics survey. Failure to make a report could result in a $100 fine per employee.
In a statistic touted by the governor’s office, California women lose $87 billion to the pay gap every year according to the National Partnership for Women and Families. A U.S. Census Bureau report says women earn 82.3 cents per every dollar earned by a man.
In California, Asian and white people were more likely to be at the highest end of the pay scale, while Hispanic and Latino people and Black people were overly represented at the lowest pay levels, according to the Los Angeles Times, which reported on 2020 data collected on 6.3 million workers by the state.
Keller Grover is here to help workers with their employment-related disputes. If your employer isn’t paying you fairly, we can help you better understand your rights, protections and options. In more than 25 years litigating fraud and employment cases, we have recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for clients and class members.
Contact us today for a free, confidential consultation.