Pay Ranges Are Coming To Job Postings. Why Hasn’t It Happened Before Now?

David Ryder, Bloomberg

Salary ranges should be like the nutritional labels on food packaging, one human resources executive wrote in response to my story last week, which reported that Microsoft will be among the first major corporations to include pay information in all U.S. job postings.

“Why have we not always done this?” wrote Steve Cadigan, LinkedIn’s first chief human resources officer and a future-of-work expert who wrote the book Workquake, on LinkedIn. “It’s kinda sad that we see this as a big deal.”

Yet it is.

In a blog post, the tech giant said Wednesday that it would disclose salary ranges in all internal and external U.S. job postings no later than January 2023. That date is when Washington State, where Microsoft’s headquarters are located, will start requiring employers with at least 15 employees to disclose salary ranges for each position. The law covers Washington State; Microsoft’s initiative will apply “across the U.S.,” it said.

Microsoft is considered to be a bellwether among large companies for employment practices, and is likely to be emulated by other big employers. “It’s going to force others off the sidelines,” Christine Hendrickson, a former partner at Seyfarth Shaw who is now the vice president of strategic initiatives at Syndio, told me last week. “When companies start acting, others are soon to follow.”

Why haven’t companies shared this information already? They haven’t had to, for one. Employers considered pay ranges closely guarded secrets, viewing them as competitive information. Most still do—and they certainly don’t relish the thought of sharing the data. In New York City, which also passed a law requiring pay ranges in job ads, employers have already pushed to postpone the requirement there.

But a new generation’s expectations about transparency—and a tight labor market that’s empowered workers to expect more from potential employers—have prompted more disclosures of pay ranges and data. Meanwhile, a growing number of laws in state and local jurisdictions that require pay range disclosure—there are now six—mean more employers will likely embrace the practice rather than fight it.

Here’s the thing: Big companies don’t want to have different H.R. policies for different states. It complicates things—and in this case would mean unequal access to information for employees who live in states where laws require it and those who don’t. Few things can prompt more frustration among employees than knowing what some people stand to make—while the information is kept from others.

My bet? You’ll see other big companies follow suit soon. It may not be right away—I’d guess Microsoft is a bit further ahead in doing the work of auditing its pay scales and making sure people are paid equally in order to make a bet like this. As others feel comfortable revealing this data won’t cause an uproar among current workers, they’ll do it, too. Employees, after all, are going to expect it.

This article, written by Jena McGregor, appeared first on Forbes.