NJBIA is seeking amendments on a bill that would require salary transparency in job postings.
Assemblyman Paul Moriarty (D-4) is sponsoring bill A-3937, which aims to make New Jersey the sixth state with a law that mandates certain businesses to disclose salary ranges or hourly wages when advertising positions.
The legislation, which was up for discussion this week in the Assembly Labor Committee, also mandates employers to announce all promotional opportunities to current employees.
As reported on NJ.com this week, NJBIA Vice President of Government Affairs Alexis Bailey contended whether it was necessary to mandate posting salaries and wages if businesses saw the benefit of doing it on their own to attract new talent in a competitive job market.
She also said the requirement to post promotions should be changed.
“I understand the intent that if it’s a brand-new position for a promotional opportunity, I think it might make sense for employees and workers to know about those opportunities,” Bailey said.
“But a lot of times someone might get a promotion because they’re doing a really great job in their current role and they’re getting a raise and a new title, but that doesn’t really open a new position within the company, per se.”
Bailey also said the threshold of including businesses of five employees or more is too low and the penalties of a $1,000 fine for a first violation, $5,000 for the second and $10,000 for each subsequent violation were too steep. She recommended a warning for a first offense.
“Small businesses don’t always have the most sophisticated hiring mechanisms,” Bailey said.
Similarly, Bailey also told NJ Monitor that other states with similar laws have had only varying success.
“There’s just so many factors that go into compensation that it makes it difficult to say if we should have a hard-and-fast rule on what ranges should be,” Bailey told reporter Sophie Munoz-Nieto. “I think from a policy standpoint, maybe we should take the wait-and-see approach on this.”
