Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

I love the US and California, the tech scene is amazing and I was lucky to met such talented and friendly people in about every place I worked... from very large tech cos to &quot;garage&quot; startups.<p>Which is why it pains me to see that so many engineers get stuck with such ridiculous salaries (relative to the value and wealth they provide and create). Problem is that some salaries are seemingly high compared to what the average worker does in the country but ridiculously to what they would look like if engineers were allowed to capture a greater (that is a &gt;0.01%) percentage of the added value they CREATE.<p>Most, from the freshly out-of-school to the senior engineer with glowing reviews are getting scammed because they get paid just enough to live a comfortable life but not nearly enough to what they are worth and what they would need to consolidate their place in the upper middle class.<p>I had one company acquired by a large tech co. Probably going to start another one soon, I won&#x27;t commit the same mistake twice... engineers need their fair share. They are the one creating things, they are the one on the front line and we should not get satiated by the crumbles we are left with.

I hate this question. I frequently dodge or outright deny answering it. I won&#x27;t lie about it, I just say, no you don&#x27;t get that information.<p>To dodge this question I say the following: &quot;I&#x27;m looking for compensation in the range of xxxx to XXXX. This obviously depends on the benefits packages, for an awesome benefits package you may be closer to xxxx, if your benefits are bad then you&#x27;ll need to be closer to XXXX.&quot;<p>If they persist I follow up with, &quot;I gave you my range if that isn&#x27;t enough for you then I&#x27;m sorry but I&#x27;ll have to pass, I don&#x27;t disclose my current salary to any recruiters.&quot;<p>This has worked really well for me in the past.

This. Negotiating a compensation package, in general, is asymmetric information warfare. Having to reveal your salary history you may as well not even negotiate.<p>I know so many women who are constantly bit by this and negotiating in general. Here&#x27;s an idea: compensation agents who negotiate the compensation package on your behalf. Athletes and actors have them, why not everyone else?

<i>&quot;Companies will not be allowed to prohibit their workers from telling others how much they are paid.&quot;</i><p>Companies are not allowed to do that now. That&#x27;s Federal labor law, and it&#x27;s been prohibited since 1935.[1] This only applies to employees, not contractors.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dol.gov&#x2F;wb&#x2F;media&#x2F;pay_secrecy.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dol.gov&#x2F;wb&#x2F;media&#x2F;pay_secrecy.pdf</a>

I applied and soon after worked as an engineer for a large company that not only asked for my previous compensation but part of the application process involved my employer validating that I actually made what I told them. They worked with a third party to match my figures with W2 statements and&#x2F;or pay stubs.<p>It was really intrusive. Pay should equate to value, not some silly ladder climb

Candidates &quot;may&quot; offer this information upfront? I feel like I&#x27;m watching Office Space<p>&quot;Am I supposed to tell you my salary before even hearing your initial offer?&quot; &quot;Some employees choose to offer salary information, and we encourage that&quot;

Feel free to tell them what you make just add 15-40% to that number. This has worked well for me. Employers seem happy as well.<p>Example:<p>Assuming your current salary is X. &quot;So I currently make (X * 1.20), but in order to make the jump I need at least (X * 1.40).&quot;<p>That way they get to feel out immediately whether they can afford you, you get the salary that would motivate you, and no one is wasting time in the hiring process.<p>Keep in mind many employers wont want to pay you more than 8-10% more than what you &quot;currently make&quot; unless they are incredibly motivated to hire you and you alone.

I started off with a really low salary because I was working as a developer outside the SF bay area and in an industry that paid really low. Then moved to the bay area. Every company or recruiter tries to place you at maybe 5% to 10% more than your current job.<p>There was a time when I was just hopping from job to job to increase my salary. If there wasn&#x27;t this convention of paying someone the same I wouldn&#x27;t have switched so many jobs. There are plenty of places I wanted to stick around but got a much higher offer somewhere else so I pretty much had to switch.<p>My salary is more than 400% what it was 10 years ago. I feel that I have finally reached market value and have a salary I am happy with. It would have been nice if it was based on supply &#x2F; demand and how well I interviewed.<p>That being said, I&#x27;m not sure I agree with this law. I like the outcome but not the implementation.<p>Having a law that says you can&#x27;t ask someone something seems to violate Freedom of Speech and it sets a dangerous precedent.

Massachusetts is doing some good steps to better the work environment and entrepreneurship. This is a nice to have in negotiations and MA challenging non-competes are great things to change[1].<p>Non-competes are extremely anti-innovation, anti-worker, anti-business and really anti-American. Workers that are skilled cannot be owned. Good knowledgable workers should be compensated to keep them around, not fear of legal threat of using skills they developed.<p>Non-competes need to go away everywhere.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fortune.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;30&#x2F;massachusetts-non-compete-passes&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fortune.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;30&#x2F;massachusetts-non-compete-pass...</a>

This is so needed in California. My past personal experience and my friends&#x27; experience in the Bay Area shows how hard the recruiters can push for the current salary. What they are saying is that we will give you a 10% raise from your current salary, but not what you and we can agree on is your market price. This is so against letting the markets figure it out.

The part of this that looks more important than forbidding recruiters from asking about previous pay is this:<p>&gt;<i>&quot;And the law will require equal pay not just for workers whose jobs are alike, but also for those whose work is of “comparable character” or who work in “comparable operations.” Workers with more seniority will still be permitted to earn higher pay, but the law effectively broadens the definition of what is equal work.&quot;</i><p>I suspect the result will be to flatten wages everywhere except the most easily quantifiable, thus legally defensible, cases. Sales people will still make a commission on what they sell and have a huge gap in their earnings, but it will become <i>much</i> harder to reward rare engineering talents or even people who work on their craft recreationally.

I never tell people anyway. I slightly evade the question and say, (in a somewhat annoyed tone), &quot;I&#x27;m looking for something in the $X range,&quot; where $X is higher than what I actually want. So far, that&#x27;s worked out fine, since that is the information they actually want to know.

I suspect this law may backfire. It&#x27;s hard enough determining what a prospective employee may be worth to a company, and the salary history is used as a proxy. Take that out of play, and the risk is higher in hiring the candidate. Higher risk means lower pay offers, not higher.

I&#x27;ve never understood why this question is such a big deal for people. When asked what you made at your last job, you should just give the number you would like to make at this new job.

Excellent measure. I remember interviewing at a very large corpo (think one of the main phone carriers), their application process online required applicants to reveal their salaries for the past 10 years. And before making an offer, they were asking for a W2 to make sure you were currently making what you claimed. Needless to say, I laughed at their face and walked.<p>I assume this law won&#x27;t apply to questions like &quot;how much are you expecting to make?&quot;.

What&#x27;s the use?<p>Employer: We are willing to make an offer to you. We will offer a base pay of $125k.<p>Employee: what? I am already making $150k with my current employer.<p>Employer: Oh..we can&#x27;t ask your current salary..so we just threw a number at the lower end to see if you would accept.

I think is a great step. I work for a big company and has been around for 4 years. when I joined this company, my salary was on par (also justified as per my previous salary). We saw a tremendous amount of growth in the technology and the team has grown by 20X. The people joining now are getting far better salary because either their current salary is high and they negotiate on that OR the company is ready to pay more for filling up the positions. But I feel very bad when I think of it, the employees who laid the foundations got very small hike over the years and I feel underpaid now. Also, I was the member who laid the foundation of the team and created the initial reputation which was required.<p>Salary negotiations based on previous salaries are just plain idiocracy. I have co-workers who are excellent in terms of the skillset and the value they create but they come from either smaller cities where the pay was not great or from startups which didn&#x27;t pay very well in the early days. These people suffer a lot even though they know that their counterparts who come from large companies and had good salaries get paid almost 1.5-2X.

this wont really help much because they will still ask how much do you expect to make and people who have low salaries currently will say a low number that is just slightly higher than their current salary. They need to make it illegal to ask any salary questions prior to the company making an initial offer. I cant even understand why they would not just make it mandatory to reveal the salary range of the position at the beginning of the interview process. No company can make a valid argument for why they cant reveal a salary range to prospective employees other than we can pay them less if they dont know the range.

Here&#x27;s a question I&#x27;ve wondered for a long time -- replies appreciated!:<p>Is there any legal risk in lying about your current&#x2F;past salary? I&#x27;m not talking ethically. That&#x27;s a different discussion.

This is desperately needed in the UK, the recruiters (external) here won&#x27;t even let you proceed if you don&#x27;t reveal it.

If asked, say &quot;My previous contract prohibits sharing compensation details [as it probably does], and I take my commitments very seriously.&quot;

One of my coworkers just got hired by one of the big Silicon Valley companies and he said that the company knew his salary down to the cent without him disclosing it. Does anybody know how they could have found out? Could this be part of the background check?

This is good legislation. Hopefully this is legislation that we will no longer need in the future. Good government doesn&#x27;t always mean smaller government. It gets smaller when it needs to and sometimes larger when it needs to.

No one mentions that this isn&#x27;t officially implemented until 2018. Don&#x27;t go into interviews expecting this to be law, and definitely use the strategies that other users have pointed out.

Any change to the bargaining process will not fix the gender pay gap, as it is no significant factor. There is an excellent Freakonomics episode about it: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;freakonomics.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;the-true-story-of-the-gender-pay-gap-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;freakonomics.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;the-true-story-of-the-gender...</a>

What are the chances that in this particular case, enforcing noise in the data actually leads to better economic results?<p>Technically less information can lead imperfect human reasoners to more rational allocation of resources, but you&#x27;d have to do a lot more work to prove that to me than some policymaker&#x27;s &quot;feeling&quot;.

&gt; a group of female cafeteria workers who filed a lawsuit in 1991 seeking parity with male janitors, who did comparable work, the cafeteria workers said, but were paid significantly more.<p>You&#x27;d have to pay me more to do janitorial work than cafeteria work. Cleaning bathrooms is dangerous, dirty work.

By the way, if a new employer asks this, you don&#x27;t have to answer them. You can politely say &quot;I&#x27;d prefer not to share my previous salary with you.&quot; If you&#x27;re at this point in the discussion this isn&#x27;t likely to hurt your chances of being hired.

I&#x27;m from MA and I think this is a great piece of legislation.<p>I&#x27;d like to take it a step further and some day see a service where people can submit <i>verified</i> wage data to and access this wage data when they are negotiating employment terms.<p>My employer uses wage data from a survey they buy for several thousands of dollars when it comes negotiation time. The wage data is reported by other employers and includes wage data from companies across the country. I think it would help level the playing field when it comes to negotiations for anyone that is in that position because as it is now, even with this piece of legislation, employers have the upper hand.

I don&#x27;t like bans but whenever people asked me about my current pay I told them it is confidential and I should be judged based on what you are willing to pay rather than what I am making.<p>My first job change gave me 2X the salary.

I&#x27;ve read a few anecdotes here about fumbling the question. Let me tell you the magic words, &quot;Sorry, that&#x27;s confidential (it really is), I&#x27;m looking for $X.&quot;

I never ask the question, &quot;what did you make&quot;, but &quot;what do you want to make&quot;. More often specifically preface with, &quot;do not tell me what you make&quot;.

How weird, I just read a really interesting article about pay disclosure, esp. regarding women&#x27;s pay: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;05&#x2F;im-terrified-tell-people-much-make&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;05&#x2F;im-terrified-tell-people-much-m...</a><p>I&#x27;m a big advocate for salary transparency, but I share that author&#x27;s struggle - what&#x27;s the best way to ethically disclose my salary to my coworkers, or publicly?

First thought Finally! Jobs are worth what the market bears right then, not what they were previously worth, so why do employers want to ask such demeaning questions Second thought Boy, all of those recruiting&#x2F;hr programs are going to need to be re-written to comply. A lot require you to say what you&#x27;ve been paid at every previous job. Since they are sold nationally, all of those HR departments will need that one field stripped out to now comply to MA law.

If an employer asks for your previous salary decline and threaten to walk. It&#x27;s not that hard. Learning how to handle these situations is an acquired skill. Learn it.

I got bit by this at my current job. I didn&#x27;t remember telling them my salary at my previous company (usually I decline to answer), but my manager brought it up when I was trying to negotiate an extra 5k.<p>It&#x27;s unfortunate that I must&#x27;ve told them my base salary when applying online and that I didn&#x27;t do a proper negotiation afterwards. My new company doesn&#x27;t give out stocks of any kind, so overall I&#x27;m making less.

Might this be unconstitutional under the first amendment?

It pains me to see that people can&#x27;t apply common sense without law anymore.<p>If a potential employer asks about my previous salary, I refuse to answer. Similarly, it never even occured to me to hide my salary from my coworkers regardless of what my employer asked me to do.<p>Needless to say, if any employer has a problem with that, I definitely don&#x27;t want to spend 8+ hours of my day with them.

I love the new law, sad to see it based on a false premise:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;karinagness&#x2F;2016&#x2F;04&#x2F;12&#x2F;dont-buy-into-the-gender-pay-gap-myth" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;karinagness&#x2F;2016&#x2F;04&#x2F;12&#x2F;dont-buy-...</a>

Would love to hear the opinions of founders who hated this practice as employees now they&#x27;re on the other side of the table.<p>Personally I&#x27;ve always had a strict salary&#x2F;comp band in place for each position, but having never had a company with &gt; 25 people, I wonder at what point that breaks down.

At will employment. The company may change the salary at any time. They can just employ them, then immediately seek their salary history, then _alter_ their salary based on it. If a whole lot of companies coordinate to do it together, then the system is bypassed rather easily.

I am not sure of the utility of asking the salary question anyway. A credit check which is usually part of the pre-offer paper chase will provide an employer with plenty of info for determining your current burn rate.

How common is this question?<p>Over here in Russia asking how much you make is often considered a taboo, or a bad tone. I&#x27;ve never been or heard about this being asked at the interviews.

This may have the opposite effect as intended, as men are more likely to apply to a job that has a lower upfront compensation and try to negotiate the price upward.

Where does the law sit on recruiters asking that question? Because they&#x27;re the ones who&#x27;ve loved asking me that one.<p>I see a loophole forming before my eyes.

This is interesting, especially given that many people lie about previous pay in order to get a higher pay. It&#x27;s an extremely effective strategy.

If Hillary wins, you&#x27;ll also be able to ask about your peers&#x27; salary, legally - not sure to what extent of course, probably won&#x27;t apply if you&#x27;re asking for a level higher than yours - so that the &quot;glass ceiling&quot; might be broken, meaning women in the same job w&#x2F;the same quals&#x2F;experience should make the same as men. My wife found out through a colleague who&#x27;s a friend of hers as well that he made 10k over her, same experience&#x2F;qualifications&#x2F;title....

Does this sort of information get revealed in background checks for previous places of employment or is that a privacy thing?<p>Also is it really necessary for a state to dictate such things? Is it too much pressure for someone to respectfully decline to answer such a question and practice some negotiation skills? What exactly is the state&#x27;s interest in this sort of thing precisely?

how would this prevent an external recruiter from asking?<p>What if the company has an office just over the MA border where they hire then later relocate the employee to MA?

Can an employee ask employer&#x27;s debt details?

This law goes in effect in two years?!

This law goes in effect in two years!?

non compete is far more valuable.

Good. To be honest asking about previous salary is offensive, and only helps employers take advantage of employees who aren&#x27;t tactful enough to refuse to answer.

Are you a star? If not, then you have very little leverage in negotiating compensation. That is true across professions: Rock Star, Sports Star, Sales Star, Surgical Star, you name it. Next ask if stars are made or born. If born, then you&#x27;re out of luck again - until you are reincarnate. If made, then learn from how others made themselves stars. Like many things in life, it helps to start young, and it often comes down to luck.<p>If your plan is not to achieve fame and fortune via stardom, then pursue it through more accessible means like being a doctor or lawyer or banker or businessperson. Being an engineer or scientist can be a stepping-stone, but if you stay on that stone then there is a slim chance of achieving star power.