Young people ask for pay transparency in job postings, saying the deck is stacked against job seekers
CBC
Four years ago, Michelle Hamaoui arrived in Vancouver from Lebanon and got a job in which she felt she was underpaid. She says going forward, she won't do that again.
Next time she's job searching,the IT project manager wants to know what she's getting herself into before applying — and that includes the salary. When she first came to Canada, she was unfamiliar with the job market and she says that information made public would have been helpful when negotiating.
"You don't want to go through the whole process of doing four months of interviews with a company only to realize at the end that the offer does not match what you were looking for or what is actually sustainable for you," she said.
Hamaoui is one of many people in the private sector hoping to see provincial governments require compensation information to be included in job listings.
"There is zero reason for that not to be disclosed the same way it's working in the public sector," she said. "There's no reason it shouldn't work for the private sector."
B.C.'s NDP government, led by John Horgan, says it's considering the move as a measure to reduce gender wage gaps.
Legislatively, the movement is gaining steam in the United States. Colorado already requires pay scales in job ads. New York City's requirement is set to begin in November, and the state of Washington to follow in 2023. Several other states require the information to be given if the job seeker asks.
And across the Atlantic, the government in the United Kingdom is trialing a pilot project.
In Canada, the practice of posting the information does happen organically. Indeed Canada, a job posting site, says 66 per cent of its listings contain some form of pay information.
But Sarah Kaplan, a business professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, says Canada hasn't kept up with other countries when it comes to requiring the data.
"I think we're going to see this more and more, not only on the big sites like Indeed, but every company that posts a job ad," said Kaplan.
She thinks there's going to be more pressure to post the range.
A recent survey from Bankrate.com, a personal finance website in the U.S., says young people are breaking the taboo around talking about money. Approximately 40 per cent of millennial and generation Y employees have told coworkers what they make.
That's compared to 31 per cent of gen-Xers, those aged 42 to 57, but only 19 per cent of baby boomers, those aged 57 to 76.
