New York City has such a law, and New York state has a law like it up for vote soon: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/s5598

"Requires employers to disclose compensation or range of compensation to applicants and employees upon issuing an employment opportunity for internal or public viewing or upon employee request."

That turns on in New York City on May 15, 2022.[1] Employers will start coming around after that.

New York State is considering that statewide.

[1] https://www.natlawreview.com/article/nyc-requires-employers-...

> Range of compensation

Can’t a company just say that the range is $1-$1,000,000 for every single job? Or is there something in the law that requires a narrower range?

The law includes language that says an employer must make a “good faith” determination of the lowest and highest salary it would pay for that position. However, the law itself law does not define what “salary” is; presumably that definition exists elsewhere.

I would therefore hope that if a company posted a range of $1-$1,000,000 for a job (let alone all jobs) they would get some scrutiny from regulators. But I don't know. I don't live there and I'm not a lawyer.

Still, the could post something like $50k - $500k and say to the regulators that it depends on so many factors.

It might benefit workers in general but I don't think it will benefit me as a software engineer. The salary becomes tied to the job title/level and it becomes hard for me to individually negotiate. When the salary is tied to the job title, it is also much harder to get meaningful raises in many companies because the promotion process is a lot more bureaucratic.

That’s the point… pay transparency encodes a worldview wherein it is unjust for employees with ostensibly similar responsibilities to have different pay.

I agree with the general point but in practice you will find a range of people with the same supposed responsibilities. Not all of them would be executing them at the same level.

Of course, this could be rectified by having finer grained titles. However, finer grained titles introduce their own overhead, introducing more politics/bureaucracy into the system (people at Microsoft would be familiar with this scenario).