Tomorrow morning!
8am!
Senate Labor/Health!
They just sent Workplace transparency - 2 to Senate Labor/Health at 8am tomorrow morning!
Testify in support!
This bill is a great tool to close the gender wage gap. One of the best tools, in fact. We're asking you to testify. You can sign up here:
Here’s what we know about wage transparency:
It is unlawful for private sector employers to prohibit employees from discussing wages and compensation, and it has been since the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935.
Secrecy surrounding salaries typically benefits the organization more than the employees.
Unconscious bias can infiltrate salary decisions when pay is kept secret.
We know workers are more motivated when salaries are transparent. They work harder, they’re more productive, and they’re better at collaborating with colleagues.
Clear, objective data on how to advance in an organization, motivates employees to succeed. Workers are more productive and companies experience less turnover.
Open discussion of salaries among peers and co-workers, experts say, is a powerful tool to fight pay inequity.
Eliminating questions about salary history (which this bill does) and removing negotiations (by publishing salaries) evens the playing field for women and can make the hiring process has become easier on the organization's end as well.
What does the research say?
A recent research report from PayScale found that when all compensable factors are controlled, pay transparency closes the gender wage gap completely. Pay transparency is a spectrum for how organizations share information about pay practices and decision making with employees. For women who agreed that their organization’s pay practices are transparent, the gender wage gap was nonexistent, with women making between $1.00 and $1.01 for every $1.00 that a man makes. This was true across age groups and job levels. Pay transparency was also shown to narrow the gender wage gap across occupation and industry.
Why? Well, part of the reason for the gender wage gap is the unwillingness of many organizations to modernize their compensation practices. Many organizations today rely on traditional compensation models where pay is determined in the shadows and reliant on negotiation and manager discretion. The problem with a closed approach is that it statistically favors men. Many organizations are subject to unconscious bias and gender norms that punish women for asking for more.
Pay transparency is thought to counteract pay inequity because it forces organizations to mature their compensation practices and develop a thought-out, data-driven approach to compensation planning that places value on the job more than the person and is fair to all employees. Organizations with mature compensation practices have a pay philosophy, a compensation structure with pay grades and job-based pay ranges, and provide manager training on pay communications.
Pay transparency is also gaining in popularity for reasons other than closing the gender wage gap. With digital transformation, transparency is becoming increasingly common at all levels of business. As part of a broader compensation plan, pay transparency has also been shown to have a positive effect on job satisfaction, employee engagement, and productivity.
Read the whole PayScale report here:
What's more, advocates for pay disclosure typically focus on the advantage it gives to women in negotiating for equal pay. Research suggests that companies might be the real winners--and there are unexpected benefits to pay transparency.
Pay transparency has the potential to boost economic output by improving the productivity of workers. Field experiment have shown repeatedly that workers who know about their earnings relative to their peers were more productive than those that weren’t given that information. In fact, the work output of those in the informed group increased by about 10 percent after they learned their relative positions.
There are still a lot of myths around pay transparency, but these field studies along with data from corporations, governmental entities, school districts, hospitals, and organizations that publish their compensation charts and pay scales show that pay transparency is beneficial to businesses.
Pay transparency can even protect companies by “minimizing the risk of disparate treatment claims and increasing job satisfaction for workers,” according to Angela Cornell, the director of the Labor Law Clinic at Cornell Law School.
Wage transparency is a tool being used effectively by top companies to attract and retain top talent: “Pay equity is no longer a defensive conversation, but a badge of honor critical to attracting & retaining top talent.” -Natasha Lamb, Arjuna Capital, named by Bloomberg Businessweek as one of the “Bloomberg 50” who defined global business in 2017.
It's a realistic solution that can be implemented today.
p.s. -- Wyoming's own Department of Workforce Services also produced research for the legislature that shows that wage transparency is an effective tool in closing the gender wage gap. To learn more about the gender wage gap in Wyoming, you can read this study: A Study of the Disparity in Wages and Benefits Between Men and Women in Wyoming: Update 2018 or download it here.
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