Most employers who received an enforcement letter have agreed to stop excluding Colorado applicants in their job postings. Those who don't respond will be subject to a formal investigation — which could result in fines as high as $10,000 per violation. "I'm already seeing Coloradans act surprised when a job doesn't post the pay," Moss told me. "It's becoming the norm in Colorado really quickly, because the law and compliance have gone very well."
But given the boom in remote work, the state still has a ways to go to get to full compliance. I told Moss about Insider's own job postings that I scrolled through before our call, many of which were remote-optional. Not a single one included any salary information, even though the company has at least one editor based in Colorado. Is my employer out of compliance with Colorado's law, I asked Moss. "Yes," he said. (An Insider spokesperson told me that the company is currently reviewing its postings to ensure that they comply with Colorado law.)
A new normal
Thanks to Colorado's new law, no region has seen a bigger boom in pay transparency than the Rocky Mountains. There, job postings that include salary information have quadrupled since 2019, according to Emsi Burning Glass, which tracks labor-market data. But the trend is taking place everywhere: In March through June of this year, 12% of job postings nationwide included salary information, up from 8% in 2019.
It's not just the new laws that are driving the increase in transparency. In the wake of #metoo and Black Lives Matter, employers are under tremendous pressure from employees and shareholders to demonstrate a commitment to pay equity. A new wave of union drives, from digital media outlets to Amazon warehouses, are championing the kind of pay transparency that is a standard component of most collective bargaining agreements. And many companies are starting to realize that it's easier to post the same information everywhere, rather than trying to target disclosures geographically.
"When Colorado passed, it seemed like a bit of an anomaly," said Christine Hendrickson, who co-chairs a pay equity group for the law firm Seyfarth Shaw. "But now we're seeing this ramp-up with new laws that are proactive. It's requiring employers to think really deeply about how they can comply with all these different laws."
More information is good. Once people get information in a market, you never look back.Scott Moss, Colorado official who regulates pay disclosure
When it comes to compensation, I think we're getting close to the tipping point of a new normal. Soon, even beyond the handful of states that have implemented pay disclosure laws, job applicants will expect to know what they'll earn — and employees will expect to know that they're making the going rate for the jobs they're performing. This will be a gamechanger, especially in professional jobs, where pay levels are more variable than in low-wage work. "More information is good," Moss, the Colorado official, told me. "Once people get information in a market, you never look back. It becomes strange to think there was ever a time where we didn't have this information."
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Plenty of companies are sure to resist this more transparent future. But once they stop clinging to secrecy, they may find that a better informed labor market works better for them as well. After all, job interviews are just as time-consuming for businesses as they are for candidates, and it'll save both parties a lot of time if their salary expectations are in line from the start.
Disclosing salary ranges could also offer managers a chance to improve relationships with their existing staff. "When pay's secret, people believe they're underpaid," Elena Belogolovsky, a leading researcher on pay secrecy, told me. And that leads to a lot of unnecessary resentment. One of Belogolovsky's studies suggests that, with transparency, people perform better on the job. It makes sense: When we know we're getting paid fairly, we can all stop worrying about whether we're getting screwed over and get on with the work we were hired to do. "Based on the research that we have," Belogolovsky said, "I truly believe that pay transparency will lead to better outcomes — for organizations, for individuals, and for society as a whole."
If a world of open salaries sounds far-fetched, consider the fact that government jobs have offered full transparency for years. Civil servants seem to deal with the information just fine. My wife, who's a government attorney, knew what her salary would be before she completed a single line of her job application. With a simple Google search, she could even look up exactly what her peers and bosses make. Preparing for her recent performance evaluation, she spent plenty of time worrying about whether her supervisor thought she was doing well. But she didn't spend a single second strategizing for a raise, the way I almost certainly will when it comes time for my annual review. I think both she and her employer are better off for it.