Background
Salary Transparency Rose by 138% in the NY-NJ-PA Metro Area within a Year of Local Law 32’s Implementation.
Feb 2022 vs Feb 2023
Indeed Hiring Lab
Since November 2022, with the passage of Local Laws 32 and 59 (“the Salary Transparency Law”), jobs posted in New York City must include salary information, putting an essential tool in the hands of job applicants as they seek a fair and equitable wage. Now that the Salary Transparency Law has been in effect for two years, the Council’s Oversight and Investigations Division (OID) and Legislative Division’s Data Team (“Data Team”), have conducted an assessment of the effectiveness of the law to date. OID investigated and analyzed enforcement efforts at the New York City Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), the agency responsible for enforcing the Salary Transparency Law. OID also met with senior staff at CCHR, submitted written questions to the agency, and reviewed publicly available information about the agency’s enforcement of the law. In addition, to evaluate compliance with the law in the universe of job postings in New York City, the Data Team analyzed more than 60,000 unique job postings from Indeed and Google for Jobs over a period of approximately two months in late 2023.
The Council’s investigation found that while most job postings in New York City are compliant with the Salary Transparency Law, and CCHR has made a substantial effort to enforce the law, additional steps may be taken to improve salary transparency in the city. This report includes several recommendations related both to the law itself and to CCHR’s enforcement efforts.
Executive Summary
Findings
CCHR brought complaints against a broad range of entities.
Of the 32 publicly available CCHR-initiated cases, 28 were against employers and four were against companies maintaining widely known job search platforms. The employers spanned a wide range of industries, including finance, automobiles, and media.
CCHR does not sufficiently report its salary transparency enforcement results or seek to publicize them.In its publicly available information regarding salary transparency cases, CCHR reveals very little about the outcomes of closed cases. This leaves the public uninformed as to what CCHR has achieved from its enforcement of the law. In the past, the agency has posted “Settlement Highlights” for certain cases, noting whether the agency imposed a monetary penalty or required specific actions from a respondent. However, for Salary Transparency Law cases, CCHR has not made a single public announcement, even as it closed 27 agency-initiated cases.
Recommendations
The Administration should fully fund and staff CCHR to adequately enforce legal protections of New Yorkers.
Despite the Council’s call for the Administration to restore funding for CCHR to pre-pandemic levels, it has not yet done so. Furthermore, OMB and CCHR must prioritize filling vacancies within the Commission’s Law Enforcement Bureau and implement measures to retain staff.
CCHR Should Publicize the Outcomes of Closed Salary Transparency Cases
Failing to share this information represents a missed opportunity to promote compliance with the law and to deter those who might violate it in the future. As it has for other antidiscrimination cases, the Commission should issue press releases describing the outcomes of its closed salary transparency cases. Additionally, the Commission should promptly publish as much case documentation of closed cases as is feasible, enabling the public to understand whether companies admitted liability, paid a penalty, or committed to taking steps to avoid future violations.
Mayoral offices, City agencies, and the New York State Department of Labor (NYSDOL) should collaborate with CCHR to promote and ensure widespread compliance with the law.
Administration officials should support CCHR in advancing compliance efforts, leveraging the reach of City agencies that engage with employers and job seekers to publicize CCHR’s cases and emphasize the importance of complying with the law. Additionally, CCHR should strengthen its coordination with NYSDOL, which oversees enforcement of the state’s salary transparency law, to align efforts and maximize impact.
CCHR should consider strategies to discourage the use of wide salary ranges.
The agency could take several actions, including publishing legal enforcement guidance indicating that ranges exceeding a certain size will be prioritized for investigation. Additionally, CCHR could issue a rule requiring employers or employment agencies to provide justification for posting wide ranges.
CCHR Should Consider How to Address Missing Salaries in “Scraped” Job Postings
CCHR should consider how it can best ensure that job seekers consistently see the required salary ranges on job postings, even when postings are “scraped” from other sites and reposted on job search platforms. To achieve this, CCHR could engage directly with job search platforms to identify effective solutions, and could publish recommendations that “scraped” postings include links to original postings or disclaimers explaining the law’s requirements.
Enforcement of the Salary Transparency Law
Today, CCHR protects New Yorkers from being discriminated against on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, source of income, veteran status, caregiver status, disability, and many more protected categories, in employment, housing, and public accommodations. CCHR has the authority to bring complaints against any individual or business that violates New York City Human Rights Law (NYCHRL).
Historically, while CCHR may bring antidiscrimination cases on its own initiative, it brings far more on behalf of complainants. Last year, for example, across all types of cases, CCHR filed 332 complaints, but only 46 were agency-initiated. For Salary Transparency Law cases, however, CCHR filed far more agency-initiated cases. CCHR told OID that “[a] key takeaway is that the individuals most interested in filing complaints at the Commission are individuals who believe that a post has not been posted in good faith. Those who call to report a missing range are less interested in filing a complaint and content leaving tips for the Commission to follow up on.” CCHR has also begun proactive testing for salary transparency violations, conducting 190 tests in FY23 and 295 in FY24 (15% and 23%, respectively, of the agency’s total tests).
Report discrimination
on CCHR’s online form
or by calling
(212) 416-0197.
The Commission on Human Rights accepts and investigates complaints of discrimination filed by members of the public, including complaints alleging violations of the new salary transparency protection.
For more on OID’s review of CCHR, click here to the full report.
Analysis on New York City Job Listings and Salary Ranges
89% of job postings on Indeed included salary information compared to 56% on Google for Jobs.
November 2023
Methods
Data Collection & Metrics
Background on Data Sources
Example Salary Ratio Calculations:
Example Google for Jobs Listing:
Salary container shown in red and job description shown in blue
For more on the Data team’s methodology, findings, and analysis, click here to the NYC Council’s GitHub repository (link).
Job Search Platforms
Investigating Missing Salaries
Some portion of the missing salary ranges on both platforms are likely due to the way each of these large job platforms “scrapes” for job listings from other sites; in other words, the way Google for Jobs and Indeed pull job postings from other websites to post them on their sites. In some cases, it appears that salary ranges posted on the original website were lost during that process. For instance, job postings from NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation (H+H) on Indeed rarely included salary information—300 out of 374 postings (more than 80%) lacked this detail. However, the Data Team found that the original listings on H+H’s website did include salaries, suggesting that the “scraping” process failed to transfer this information.
The issue of missing salary information is even more pronounced on Google for Jobs than on Indeed. Of the Google for Jobs postings analyzed by the Data Team, 44% were missing a salary.
Analyzing Google for Jobs’ top sources shows the pitfalls of one job board platform “scraping” job postings from another such platform. Of the Google for Jobs postings sourced from LinkedIn, a large source of postings, 49% lacked a salary range. Similarly, a majority of Google for Jobs’ posts sourced from Trabajo.org, GrabJobs, and BeBee were missing salary information: 77%, 73%, and 64%, respectively.
Empty Salary Containers On Google For Jobs
Sources where 85% or more of postings had an empty salary container on Google for Jobs, sorted by number of total postings (only includes sources with 100 or more postings)
Wide Salary Ranges
Determining the Width of Salary Ranges
In only 3% of job postings, the maximum salary listed was less than double the minimum salary listed.
Collected from Indeed & Google for Jobs
November 2023
Buckets chosen for simplification.
Industries with the Widest Salary Ratios
Of the job titles with the widest salary ratios on Indeed, a large majority appear to be performance or commission-based roles, with titles including “Agent,” “Representative,” “Manager,” and “Sales.” A theory for this observed pattern could be that many such workers in these titles rely on commissions or bonuses atop a fixed salary, so some employers may include estimated totals in the listed “salary” to draw talent.
In addition, certain industries in the Indeed dataset have median salary ratios that are particularly high. Some examples of industries with the widest median salary ratios include stock exchanges (1.86), insurance carriers (1.65), financial transaction processing (1.59), internet and web services (1.28), and real estate agencies (1.23).
Examples of Industries
with Salary Ratios
Higher than Average
The upper salary range exceeds the lower by more than 17%.
Financial Transaction Processing (1.67x)
- Amex (1.87x)
- Western Union (1.67x)
Insurance Carriers (1.65x)
- EmblemHealth (1.76x)
- Global Atlantic Financial Group Opportunities (1.90x)
Investment & Asset Management (1.50x)
- BNY Mellon (1.86x)
- Citi (1.50x)
Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology (1.44x)
- Pfizer (1.67x)
Telecommunications (1.42x)
- Verizon (1.86x)
- Comcast (1.50x)
Acknowledgements
NYC Council Speaker Adrienne Adams thanks the Oversight and Investigations Division, specifically, Amisa Ratliff, Policy Analyst; Katie Sinise, Investigator; Uzair Qadir, Data Scientist; and Brian Parcon, Legislative Counsel, under the supervision of Assistant Deputy Directors Kevin Frick and Zachary Meher-Casallas, and Acting Director Meagan Powers; and the NYC Council’s Data Team, specifically, Data Scientists Rachel Avram and James Wu, under the supervision of Assistant Deputy Director Rose Martinez, for their efforts in producing this report.
She also thanks the Council’s Community Engagement Division, specifically, Production Assistant Brittany Ng and Senior Designer Antonio Rodriguez, under the supervision of Director of Event and Production Services Cassandra Tennyson. Appreciation is extended to the NYC Commission on Human Rights for its assistance and cooperation.
For feedback, comments, and questions please email DataInfo@council.nyc.gov.
Created by the NYC Council Data Team