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posted by martyb on Friday January 26 2018, @04:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the shift-in-the-balance-of-power dept.

Here in California, our government has passed a strange new law.

Although intended to force employers to stop offering different pay rates to men and women, the new law has the strange side effect of forcing recruiters to play fair - and recruiters aren't liking it. The law also forbids asking candidates for their prior compensation history. Again, recruiters and hiring managers aren't liking the new shift in the balance of power:

Assembly Bill No. 168
SECTION 1. Section 432.3 is added to the Labor Code, to read:

432.3. (a) An employer shall not rely on the salary history information of an applicant for employment as a factor in determining whether to offer employment to an applicant or what salary to offer an applicant.

(b) An employer shall not, orally or in writing, personally or through an agent, seek salary history information, including compensation and benefits, about an applicant for employment.

(c) An employer, upon reasonable request, shall provide the pay scale for a position to an applicant applying for employment.

(d) Section 433 does not apply to this section.

(e) This section shall not apply to salary history information disclosable to the public pursuant to federal or state law, including the California Public Records Act (Chapter 3.5 (commencing with Section 6250) of Division 7 of Title 1 of the Government Code) or the federal Freedom of Information Act (Section 552 of Title 5 of the United States Code).

(f) This section applies to all employers, including state and local government employers and the Legislature.

(g) Nothing in this section shall prohibit an applicant from voluntarily and without prompting disclosing salary history information to a prospective employer.

(h) If an applicant voluntarily and without prompting discloses salary history information to a prospective employer, nothing in this section shall prohibit that employer from considering or relying on that voluntarily disclosed salary history information in determining the salary for that applicant.

(i) Consistent with Section 1197.5, nothing in this section shall be construed to allow prior salary, by itself, to justify any disparity in compensation.

(emphasis added)

To drive salaries and wages down, Silicon Valley has for many years outsourced their recruiting efforts to other states, where the cost of living is much lower and recruiting agency employees were less likely to respect the inevitable protests from candidates over the low wages being offered, because the wages being offered were comparable to the wages being offered in the state where the recruiter was located.

Now Silicon Valley's employers have the unpleasant duty of educating their remote, far-flung, outsourced networks of workers of the new law.

If you're a job-seeker, here in California, how has this new law affected your ability to seek employment and your experience with recruiters?

If you're a recruiter - inside or outside California - how is this affecting your business? How are you treating candidates who inform you of this new law?

If you're a hiring manager, are you informing recruiters of this law? Are they informing you of this law?

Violation of the law is a misdemeanor.

The California Legislature is interested in receiving feedback from employees and candidates, also.

Obviously, the Legislature has already heard, and is hearing, from employers. But they need to hear BOTH sides in order to make (and defend) their decisions.

It's tempting to badmouth the California Legislature - but I was pleasantly surprised to discover legislative information was available, via Archie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_search_engine), from the leginfo.legislature.ca.gov website, two decades ago.


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  • (Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Friday January 26 2018, @05:41PM (21 children)

    by DutchUncle (5370) on Friday January 26 2018, @05:41PM (#628356)

    The employer may not remain silent, but may provide a pay scale of "$40K to $200K per year depending on suitability of experience".

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @05:51PM (19 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @05:51PM (#628361)

    The government does not have the authority to force one private individual to divulge information to another private individual.

    If anything, a law could at most say that an employer is committing fraud if the employer lies to a new hire about how much other employees are paid.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @05:59PM (16 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @05:59PM (#628369)

      Really? Exactly what keeps the government from having that authority? The national government of the USA might have a carefully set out set of limited powers, but state governments don't work that way. They have any power that's not forbidden to them or reserved to the national government by the national Constitution or the applicable state constitution.

      • (Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @06:06PM (15 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @06:06PM (#628375)

        No individual in California (in its entire history) has ever had the right (outside of an explicit contract) to force one private individual to divulge information to another private individual.

        Ergo, no individual in California has ever been able to delegate that authority to the government of California.

        So, whence comes the authority to do this? WHENCE, I say, WHENCE?!

        • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Spook brat on Friday January 26 2018, @06:35PM (6 children)

          by Spook brat (775) on Friday January 26 2018, @06:35PM (#628394) Journal

          Every individual in California has the right to unilaterally refuse to sign a contract. As a group the citizens of California, therefore, have the right to en-mass refuse contracts with any employer who demands applicants' salary information as part of negotiation. The Citizens of California have delegated that authority to the Legislature to establish it as a state Law, permanently encoding the desire of the Citizens.

          The Employer is not forced to disclose salary data, either; they have the option of not hiring Citizens of California if the desire of all Californians for personal privacy is not to the Employer's liking.

          This is no different than the Citizens forming a union and demanding these terms as part of a mass-bargaining or unilaterally imposed contractual term. The difference is that they are instead leveraging the existing rights of Citizenship and representation that they agreed on when establishing the State Constitution (the Union already exists!) and using the power they gave their representatives to refuse to Employers the ability to coerce individual Citizens into going against the Citizens' individual and collective interest.

          If you don't have a problem with Unions, you shouldn't have a problem with this, either.

          --
          Travel the galaxy! Meet fascinating life forms... And kill them [schlockmercenary.com]
          • (Score: -1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @07:01PM (5 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @07:01PM (#628419)

            Your answer is based on the notion that the "union" can force people at the point of a gun to join the union.

            That is itself a problem subject to the initial question: Whence comes the authority?

            You haven't solved anything.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @07:09PM (3 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @07:09PM (#628427)

              Why does anyone bother conversing with you? Always light on substance and heavy on repeated opinion and denial. You are the worst.

              • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @07:21PM (2 children)

                by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @07:21PM (#628438)

                RIGHT?

                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @07:39PM (1 child)

                  by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @07:39PM (#628453)

                  Yes that is right!

                  Oh I see, you're one of those jagoffs who put half your comment in the subject line. You are just a reactionary fool, have fun getting downmodded every day :D

                  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 27 2018, @12:57AM

                    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 27 2018, @12:57AM (#628665)

                    Oh I see, you're one of those jagoffs who put half your comment in the subject line. You are just a reactionary tool, have fun getting downmodded every day :D

                    FTFY

            • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Spook brat on Friday January 26 2018, @11:12PM

              by Spook brat (775) on Friday January 26 2018, @11:12PM (#628610) Journal

              Are you the AC I was discussing government with late last year? [soylentnews.org] If so, I owe you an essay on how sovereign individuals can legitimately come to agreement on a social contract of mutual obligation to form systems of government. Apologies for the delay, life's been busy around the holidays, and hasn't let up yet. Look for a journal post titled "Civics for Anarchists", no guarantees on arrival date.

              If not (and I suspect this is the case), your objection to the situation in the article seems to revolve around the details of how the specific system of government is organized ("Your answer is based on the notion that the "union" can force people at the point of a gun to join the union."). That issue isn't going to get resolved in this thread; it would take too much screen space, and is mostly irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Whether union membership is inherited by the children of members, and whether union membership is automatically conferred (with accompanying obligations) on anyone moving into a geographic area are separate issues from whether unionization is a legitimate means of delegating authority.

              You did not seem to object to the concept of mass negotiation or delegation of authority to a representative. If you can agree that we are free to organize into groups and appoint members of our group to act as proxies for us in contract negotiations, then let's simplify the discussion and analyze the case where the people represented by the Legislature all consented to be members of the notional "Citizen's Union". If that is the case, then the authority to pass the law comes from the consent of the Citizens who voted the legislature into place. They have the authority individually to reject bad terms of employment, and therefore they have the right as a group to reject those bad terms universally within their sphere of influence. Passing the law is the formal method they use for doing so.

              --
              Travel the galaxy! Meet fascinating life forms... And kill them [schlockmercenary.com]
        • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @06:35PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @06:35PM (#628396)

          Ah, I see the mental block you're having. You see, most of us do not agree with the decision that corporations are people. Corporations are regulated all the time, and since they are not actual citizens they do not get to enjoy the same range of basic freedoms.

          You want free markets? Well ensuring honesty in the labor market is a requirement for that to happen.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 29 2018, @05:30PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 29 2018, @05:30PM (#629893)

            They get taxed like a person and you have to sue them like a person. They are separate people as far as the law is concerned. That is why they are taxed. Sole proprietorships not corped aren't taxed or be sued, the owner is personally liable in both cases (which is part of the metric of high income individuals, they are the Waltons and such but they are also business owners and you are seeing mom and pop shops on there that aren't corps). That was the innovation that allowed most of what we have today. You can buy stock in your 401k or IRA or pension because investment is possible because you as a partial owner of those companies are liable for the taxes or in lawsuits. They aren't flesh and blood but legally they are people. Otherwise you argue against taxing them at all. Or that stock holders are liable for suits, that means that if a public insurance company or bank you own through a mutual fund is rendered bankrupt by a disaster, they can come for your home to pay off the debt. That doesn't sound like a formula for success.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @06:35PM (5 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @06:35PM (#628397)

          Hmm, that argument pretty much guts every government function and law. Which is probably your real point. And I'm pretty sure folks have been require to divulge information via subpoena for oh, centuries.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @06:54PM (4 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @06:54PM (#628415)

            So, your argument is a straw man.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @07:43PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @07:43PM (#628456)

              No, you are literally incapable of seeing the bigger picture. I think you took the DARE campaign a little too seriously.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @08:12PM (2 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @08:12PM (#628479)

              Meh, just simplifying one private citizen suing another another private citizen and asking a court clerk or lawyer to issue a subpoena. But if your argument is that private citizens can't directly compel another private citizen to give up information so the government can't either, then I suppose you disagree with subpoenas too, seeing that courts are part of the government.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @08:27PM (1 child)

                by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @08:27PM (#628492)

                When 2 people agree to a contract, they are necessarily agreeing to the means by which the contract could be enforced.

                If the Contract states that it shall be enforced by the Courts of California and their methods, then of course it makes sense for the Courts of California to be able to issue such a subpoena.

                As you can, see the AC's point has still not yet been dismantled; it remains perfectly consistent.

                • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @08:35PM

                  by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @08:35PM (#628501)

                  Stop referring to yourself as "the AC" and perhaps try owning your ideas?

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Friday January 26 2018, @06:39PM

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Friday January 26 2018, @06:39PM (#628400) Journal

      The government does not have the authority to force one private individual to divulge information to another private individual.

      Yes, because when advertisers say "symptoms include anal leakage" it's because they're really proud of that leakage! It's not because they're compelled to divulge that information.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by fritsd on Friday January 26 2018, @09:42PM

      by fritsd (4586) on Friday January 26 2018, @09:42PM (#628548) Journal

      The private individual who is an employer does not have the authority to incorporate as a company, either.
      If they want to do business as a company in a jurisdiction then they have to play by that jurisdiction's government's rules, whatever those rules are.

      Of course they could sue the government at the WTO, I guess :-)

  • (Score: 2) by rcamera on Friday January 26 2018, @05:54PM

    by rcamera (2360) on Friday January 26 2018, @05:54PM (#628364) Homepage Journal

    which is better than nothing.

    if i'm already in the $400k range, then this "senior" position that maxes out at $200k isn't something that's worth my time (or your time) discussing.

    if i'm in the $150k range, then we can start defining what qualifications are required for me to reach the higher-end of their scale, and what happens after i eventually (hopefully) get to the $200k range (upward mobility type questions).

    --
    /* no comment */