"Companies are excluding Colorado from their remote employment opportunities in order to avoid sharing the salary range of their open positions.
In May of 2019 SB19-085, titled the Equal Pay For Equal Work Act, was signed into law in Colorado. It's a fairly short read if you're not familiar with it, but its main goal is enabling pay transparency to allow for people to know if they're being discriminated against with their wages and file a complaint with the CDLE.
The law went into effect January 1st, 2021.
The most visible part of the law has been the requirement for all job listings open to a CO resident to contain a salary range. If you've seen an increase in salary ranges on job postings recently you have this law to thank.
Some companies however have decided that excluding all Colorado residents for a remote job that can be filled by someone in any of the other 49 US states is better than sharing how much they're willing to pay..."
This law is absolutely a great step forward, but I've seen plenty of roles listing pay ranges like "Minimum - $30,200/annual Maximum - $289,200/annual," so I struggle to believe that the actual information disclosure is the issue at hand.
While I like the idea of forcing these companies to list salary on job posts I'm not sure I agree with the reason the bill was put in place.
If I were a company I'd avoid CO as well. Plenty of other places to pick up employees.
Why would they not be equally open to that risk right now? I am not seeing any special connection between publicly listing a pay range and an applicant's gender.
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb19-085
Here's the bill's summary:
>Wage discrimination based on sex - complaints - civil action - exceptions to prohibitions against wage differentials - prohibited acts of employer - employment announcements required - enforcement - rules. The act removes the authority of the director of the division of labor standards and statistics in the department of labor and employment (director) to enforce wage discrimination complaints based on an employee's sex and instead authorizes the director to create and administer a process to accept and mediate complaints of, and provide legal resources concerning, alleged violations and to promulgate rules for this purpose. An aggrieved person may bring a civil action in district court to pursue remedies specified in the act.
https://www.colorado.edu/hr/colorados-equal-pay-equal-work-a...
Because if it's a theoretical minimum, I don't care about it; I want to know what the maximum is. If it's an actual minimum, I also don't care about it, but the person earning that might.
If a company offers $50k as a minimum for a role that most people earn $200k for, then they probably will not get many good people responding to it since who would want to work for a company that could lowball you by $150k? And another company can see that and up their minimum to take advantage.
It just helps weed the garbage employers out quickly. Perhaps it will not be as useful in a situation where employers have all the negotiating power where they can list $1, but at least now there is some time saved.
This is basically just letting employees do a similar first pass of employers that employers are doing on us - if your salary range is bonkers and your senior dev has a low range of 30k then I'm not working there - I don't care if you offer me 150k, you clearly have something toxic going on with your culture so into the bin you go.
The goal is to limit the amount of discretion companies can exercise on a per applicant basis by forcing them to provide a salary range up front. Even if you don't care about discrimination for some reason the law should still have a positive effect on wage transparency which should benefit anyone who works for wages.
> Companies are excluding Colorado from their remote employment opportunities in order to avoid sharing the salary range of their open positions.