Fortune Oped: Pay transparency rules are solving age-old workplace problems–but the gap in employee experience should alarm us
Aaron Terrazas
Chief Economist at Glassdoor | Jun 20, 2023
This article originally appeared on Fortune.com on May 25th, 2023.
A new wave of transparency is sweeping across America’s workplaces. At the beginning of the year, California, Washington, and New York joined Colorado to require pay transparency for most open jobs. Several other states and localities–including Illinois and Massachusetts, are now considering their own laws to require employers to disclose what they are willing to pay for open roles.
These laws were motivated, in part, by stubbornly persistent gender and racial pay gaps–but also by the pragmatic recognition that wages and salary information were only accessible to companies via salary benchmarking services, and to the lucky individuals blessed with well-positioned friends.
Since its founding nearly 15 years ago, Glassdoor has been at the forefront of making salary information more broadly available to those who don’t have the right connections. We have witnessed firsthand the magic of pay transparency–but we are also aware that it’s no miracle pill for all the ills of the labor market. There are many reasons to be hopeful about the new wave of pay transparency laws–and important reasons to be vigilant of their unintended consequences.
Finish reading the complete text at Fortune.com.
Aaron Terrazas
Aaron Terrazas is chief economist at Glassdoor. He oversees the Glassdoor Economic Research program, providing research, analysis and commentary on today’s evolving workplace and fast-changing labor market. Previously, Aaron served as the director of economic research at the trucking startup Convoy, and served in a similar role at the real estate marketplace Zillow. He started his career as an economist in 2012, supporting the work of the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Macroeconomic Analysis at the United States Treasury Department, and also worked as an analyst on immigration and labor markets at the the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute. He was educated at The Johns Hopkins University and at Georgetown University.
Tags:pay-equityTransparency
