That Dreaded Salary Question: Good Riddance!

            Question: “How do I deal with the salary history or salary expectations question in job applications and interviews?”

            Answer: Apply for a job in New York City (at least for now).

            As we all know – all too well and for all too long – the bane of job seekers’ existence has been that cursed salary question. Try as we might have, we career coaches were never able to come up with one single approach that worked for everybody, so it remained one of the great inequities of the entire job market system and job search process. Why? Not because employers didn’t know it was wrong, unfair, and unethical – they did – but because they knew they could get away with it. And they did.

            Advantage: Employer.

            But effective today, May 15, 2022, New York City employers – both public and private – with four or more employees must include a salary range in all job, promotion, or transfer advertisements and are prohibited from asking current or prospective employees about salary history or compensation packages. (Note: Outside contractors are included in the count, so there can’t be any monkey business here.) Furthermore, employers may not ask third parties (other employers, etc.) for this information.

            Advantage: Candidate.

            The one major omission in New York’s law is that it doesn’t apply to temporary workers – not yet, anyway, but it will – soon enough. With temporary workers typically comprising 2-3 percent of the workforce (this number may have been temporarily distorted during the pandemic), that’s a large enough constituency to matter, so the law will get around to them soon, I expect.    

            Actually, New York City is early, but not first, to this party. Colorado, Connecticut, and Nevada enacted laws like this in 2021, some even stricter than New York City’s. Rhode Island’s law will take effect January 1, 2023; and California, Washington, and Maryland already have laws in place, although more lenient than New York City’s. Meanwhile, more states are joining the parade.

            What’s interesting about New York City’s law, though, is that it falls not just under the jurisdiction of the Department of Labor, but also the New York City Human Rights Commission, and violation of this law constitutes an act of unlawful discriminatory practice. Aside from skewing the application process heavily against candidates, the current practice perpetuates discrimination against all categories of candidates except white males.

            For example, the typical white female earns about 82 cents for every dollar her white male counterpart earns, so if employers can hide the pay range and then ask each candidate what they’re earning, the female candidate is forced into an 18-cent disadvantage from the start. Not to mention minorities, whose disadvantages are further – in many cases, grotesquely – unequal, to say the least.

            There are some small glitches and loopholes in this law, namely poor definition of terms like “advertise” or “salary” but there’s no doubt that this is a very big and impactful step, breaking the cycle of unfair compensation. Beyond that, the law has teeth: civil penalties. That makes this much more than a labor issue; now it’s an enforceable civil rights issue – and rightly so.

            As an independent career coach and a job market observer for 25 years, I’m delighted but not satisfied. Yes, this is long overdue and it’s righteous in its principle. But given the endless variations on this theme – we do, after all, have multitudes of jurisdictions of states, cities, and so forth – what one state is owning up to another state is still avoiding. There are too many boundaries to be blurred, crossed, or permeated. So, where this should be heading to is Capitol Hill with the intention of making it a federal law. If ever there were a justification for sweeping legislation, this is it.

            In the meantime, there will be a domino effect, as one state and major city after another falls in line, and as employers by the droves will have to be careful when they’re hiring workers who might fit in somewhere in this patchwork of jurisdictions and who are being hired across many boundaries.

            And, if it hasn’t occurred to you yet, what timing this is! With everything else going in the candidate’s favor in this unbelievable job market, this couldn’t possibly have happened at a better time. It’s like having a fifth gear. So, all together now, good riddance to that awful question!

            Advantage: Candidate.

            Ain’t it about time?

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Career Coach Eli Amdur provides one-on-one coaching in job search, résumés, and interviewing.

Reach him at [email protected] or 201-357-5844