Businesses in New York Already Skirting New Salary Transparency Law

New York's new salary transparency law may require employers to give a good faith salary range to job seekers, but some businesses are testing the limits of how big the range can be.

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According to a report by Alaina Demopoulos of The Guardian, salary ranges listed for some jobs in New York City might as well not have the ranges attached in the first place. In the report, Demopoulos highlighted three particularly egregious offenses, a Deloitte posting that had a salary range of $86,800 to $161,200, an Amazon posting with a range of $125,800 to $211,300, and the worst of them, a Wall Street Journal posting with a salary range of $140,000 to $450,000.

Salary ranges like that shouldn't even qualify for a "good faith" attempt. The difference between $140,000 and $450,000 is $305,000. That means you could either hire one person at $450,000 or three people for the same job with $15,000 left over. The Deloitte posting is almost doubled from lowest to highest.

Unless the responsibilities of these jobs change based on the candidate who ends up getting hired, there's really no reason that such a wide salary range could be considered in anyway "transparent."

The true point of the law is to make sure that people are being compensated fairly for the position for which they are hired compared to others in the same position or at a similar level. Sure, some people may be more qualified than others and command a higher salary. But there's no universe in which somebody is deemed capable of doing a job for $80,000 when someone else is deemed capable of doing the same job for $160,000.

A spokesperson for Amazon told WNBF “We’ll of course comply with the law. Amazon is committed to pay equity, and we already list the pay for some roles even where it’s not required, along with information about benefits and other forms of compensation.”