NYC Pay Transparency Law Goes Into Effect

NEW YORK CITY — A new law mandating New York City employers get specific about salaries in online job postings went into effect Tuesday.

The Salary Transparency Law — Local Law 32 — requires anyone posting a New York City job include a salary minimum and maximum as part of a greater effort to combat pay inequity, city records show.

“Addressing pay inequities that have long impacted our diverse communities and workforce is critical to both our economy and gender and racial justice," City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said Tuesday.

"We must narrow stubborn gender and racial pay gaps, especially for Black, Latina, indigenous and Asian women."

The law was enacted on Jan. 15, 2022, but legislators gave employers more than nine months to prepare themselves for this transparency policy shift.

Like most municipal law, there are exceptions and caveats.

Local Law 32 applies to employers with four or more workers, seeking domestic workers and offering remote work based in New York City.

Temp agencies are not covered by the Transparency Salary Law and there's also a loophole for job postings not submitted in writing, according to a CNN report.

Advocates argue the new law will benefit both employees, who will be better informed about the value of their work, and employers who will be protected from liability.

“It puts their feet to the fire to think about how they’re setting pay and to avoid discriminatory practices that were working their way in previously,” Seher Khawaja — an attorney for Legal Momentum, a group that helped write the law — told the Associated Press.

The new law also provides a unique look at how much mega-corporations pay some of their workers, as noted by the finance magazine "Fortune."

An Amazon software engineer listing offers between $115,000 and $223,600 a year, Verizon offers data scientist candidates between $114,000 and $211,000 and J.P. Morgan associates can expect pay between $135,000 and $200,000.

For the sorry souls who studied English instead of economics, Nieman Lab took a look at how 20 media companies performed on salary transparency in New York City.

Twelve — among them WNYC and the New York Times — earned checkmarks for complete compliance, the survey showed as of 3:15 p.m. Tuesday.

The Washington Post, the New York Daily News and four others failed to provide salary information, Nieman Lab reported.

And the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post earned meh emojis from Nieman Lab for cryptic salary ranges.

As an example, the New York Post offered between $15 an hour and $125,000 a year for a digital sports reporter/producer position.

Granting the minimum hourly wage would be for a full time position (a specification that does not appear in the listing), that's about a $94,000 range.

Job listings without required salary ranges can be reported to the Commission on Human Rights online or by telephone.

Employers who skirt the law could face fines as high as $250,000 if they fail to respond to warnings from the city.