Newsom just signed California pay transparency bill SB 1162

More pay transparency is coming to California. The Golden State is joining New York City, Colorado, and Washington in requiring employers to disclose pay ranges in job ads.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 1162 into law on Tuesday, according to statements from the California Legislative Women’s Caucus and the TechEquity Collaborative.

Under the law, employers with 15 or more workers will be required to include pay ranges in job postings, and those with 100 or more employees or contractors will have to report median and mean hourly pay rates by job category and “each combination of race, ethnicity, and sex.”

“This is a big moment for California workers, especially women and people of color who have long been impacted by systemic inequities that have left them earning far less than their colleagues,” said state Sen. Monique Limón (D-Santa Barbara) in a statement. Limón introduced the bill in February.

The TechEquity Collaborative’s chief programs officer, Samantha Gordon, praised the law in a statement as “an important step in equalizing the playing field for the 1.9 million contractors, temps, vendors, and contingent workers” in California.

The bill received pushback from the California Chamber of Commerce and the Society for Human Resources Management. The chamber called the bill a “job killer” because the pay reports were going to be published online, but that provision was later removed from the bill, SHRM noted earlier this month.

“You are grouping together workers in very broad categories, as broad as ‘professionals,’” CalChamber policy advocate Ashley Hoffman said in a chamber podcast. “If you think of a hospital, that would encompass nurses, but it would also encompass someone who just graduated college and starting in your HR department. It’s truly a broad category.”

According to Forbes, SHRM argued that pay transparency would increase compression between newer and more experienced employees and could deter candidates from applying before learning about other fringe benefits.

SB 1162 doesn’t make clear how the law applies to companies that employ workers remotely.