No question, employees have gotten a boost from Washington State’s pay transparency laws that were enacted in January 2023. 

Check out the law – RCW 49.58.110

(1) The employer must disclose in each posting for each job opening the wage scale or salary range, and a general description of all of the benefits and other compensation to be offered to the hired applicant. For the purposes of this section, “posting” means any solicitation intended to recruit job applicants for a specific available position, including recruitment done directly by an employer or indirectly through a third party, and includes any postings done electronically, or with a printed hard copy, that includes qualifications for desired applicants.

(2) Upon request of an employee offered an internal transfer to a new position or promotion, the employer must provide the wage scale or salary range for the employee’s new position.

(3) This section only applies to employers with 15 or more employees.

(4) A job applicant or an employee is entitled to the remedies in RCW 49.58.060 and 49.58.070 for violations of this section. Recovery of any wages and interest must be calculated from the first date wages were owed to the employee.

While the goal of this regulation is to ensure equity in pay plans, it also helps employers establish pay ranges up front so as to avoid the headache of going thru a lengthy screening and vetting process only to find out the candidate would not accept the pay rate the employer was willing (and most times able) to offer. 

We have long known that for a job posting to be effective it needs to include information about pay, so in many ways pay transparency laws have made more companies and their job postings effective. We have also seen an effort by companies to evaluate their current pay structures before beginning their recruits, particularly if they know their pay plan for a particular job is below market. 

At PACE we provide our clients with pay information about each job, letting them know what their competitors for the same talent are willing to pay. Nothing worse than wasting time because you are underpaying the marketplace or wasting money because you are overpaying. Different geographical sectors of the Northwest job market support vastly different pay ranges.    

We’ve also seen that more and more employees are willing to speak up about the pay – to other employees and in some cases their employers, negotiating for higher levels of pay when they believe the “market’ indicates that pay increases are warranted. Employers like PACE are increasing their efforts to highlight TOTAL PAY PLANS including the costs of direct pay, bonuses, and benefits.

For employees making a job change or negotiating with their current employer about their rate of pay, avoid these common negotiation mistakes…

• Not knowing what the employer has determined is the pay range for the job you are in or interviewing for
• Not doing your research on the range of local pay rates – or cherry picking your argument to focus on the top 10% of pay ranges without considering what factors have to be present to warrant those top of range pay packages.   
• Not taking into consideration the full pay package or other important workplace ‘gimmes’ designed to drive down your out of pocket costs – benefits, the costs of transportation to and from work,  other cash or non cash perks, opportunities to earn extra money for additional work, etc.