3 ms·

> The bill, which passed with a 41 to seven vote, states that employers who fail to list minimum and maximum salary ranges for New York City-based roles are eng

> The bill, which passed with a 41 to seven vote, states that employers who fail to list minimum and maximum salary ranges for New York City-based roles are engaging in discriminatory practices. How is not disclosing a salary range in itself discriminatory? I can see how it could enable discrimination, but cannot connect the dots about how it is, in itself, an act of discrimination.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
It's discrimination because the government says it is discrimination. Changing the definition of words to fit the government's goals is becoming increasingly common (and usually with cheers from the majority of HN posters).
- hermannj314 5y ago
  Isn't defining words a major goal of legislation? Every code of laws I have read has a glossary with definitions of words written by the legislature to give clarity. How dare the government define what '3rd degree theft' means! My liberty to define that myself has being stolen!
  - mminer237 5y ago
    Well yeah, but definitions should still make sense. They could define murder as including selling plastic straws, but it would still be a fair question to ask how it is.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  as already noted, it doesn't say "discrimination". It says "discriminatory practices". If you wanted to pay people who wear purple scarves less, the first thing you'd need to be able to do is make sure that the purple scarf wearers and non-wearers had no easy way to compare salaries. That's why this is a step against discrimination: it bans a practice that can be used to discriminate (though it may not be used that way).
samschooler 5y ago
This is me arm chairing a bit, but I feel like the term "discriminatory practices" and not "discrimination" is the key here. One is a legal definition, and the other seems to represent something like "leads to discrimination" but not discrimination itself.
- nickff 5y ago
  Given your definitions, "discriminatory practices" seem like speculative scare-words. Edit: To be clear, I did not mean to accuse you of fear-mongering; I think the politicians are dressing this policy up to make themselves look better.
jshier 5y ago
If you don't post a range it makes it trivial to make lowball offers since the candidates can't know the difference. This is discriminatory since it allows radically different offers for the same position without the applicant or anyone else being able to check the behavior.
- waynesonfire 5y ago
  > This is discriminatory since it allows It also allows me to pay you less because you're not a critical thinker. But yeah, it's probably discriminatory. We don't want to hurt your ego.
  - bigbillheck 5y ago
    I thought personal attacks weren't encouraged on this forum.
  - toss1 5y ago
    If "critical thinker" is part of the job requirement, you need to be able to measure and screen for that quality/capability. If you can't figure out how to design your screening to objectively measure, sort, & select for that desired criteria, you have no business discriminating pay rates based on it. And if you CAN & DO have a screening system that does so, you can prove you are not discriminating by making offers strongly correlated to scores in your screening system, e.g., "Strong candidates get offers $X-$Y, Exceptional=115% of Strong, Good=85% of Strong, Acceptable = 75%, lower=no offer" (presuming your screening system doesn't also include other explicitly/implicitly discriminatory criteria).
geofft 5y ago
I would guess the important thing here is "it is subject to the same penalties as the things we previously said enable discriminatory practices, and so we get to reuse that abstraction," not so much "we believe, as an abstract political argument, that this is in fact discrimination." It's like how a pidfd is a file descriptor. Is Linux saying a process is a file? No, but it's saying that the usual things that apply to file descriptors - how you pass them around, how you name them, etc. - also apply to pidfds, and anything that works with file descriptors in the future should probably also work with pidfds. It's not saying that OS professors should teach "Really, a process is a kind of file." In the same way, philosophy professors should not, on the basis of this law alone, say "Really, refusing to post salary ranges is discrimination." (And a "discriminatory practice" is a specific abstraction separate from but usually connected with "discrimination" in much the same way that a "file descriptor" is a specific abstraction separate from but usually connected with "files".)
- seoaeu 5y ago
  You can also think of it as code reuse. There is already a law that says “if company X engages in discriminatory practices, then apply penalty Y”, so now that can just be reused
dragonwriter 5y ago
> How is not disclosing a salary range in itself discriminatory? It's discriminatory as a matter of law because the law defining it says so. It's practically not inherently discriminatory, but it's a technique which increases the opportunity and difficulty of proving arbitrary discrimination, including on prohibited grounds, and which serves no other purpose other than enabling difficult to certainly identify (by the target) discrimination (both on prohibited grounds and otherwise).

Mountain_Skies 5y ago

It's discrimination because the government says it is discrimination. Changing the definition of words to fit the government's goals is becoming increasingly common (and usually with cheers from the majority of HN posters).

hermannj314 5y ago
Isn't defining words a major goal of legislation? Every code of laws I have read has a glossary with definitions of words written by the legislature to give clarity. How dare the government define what '3rd degree theft' means! My liberty to define that myself has being stolen!
- mminer237 5y ago
  Well yeah, but definitions should still make sense. They could define murder as including selling plastic straws, but it would still be a fair question to ask how it is.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
as already noted, it doesn't say "discrimination". It says "discriminatory practices". If you wanted to pay people who wear purple scarves less, the first thing you'd need to be able to do is make sure that the purple scarf wearers and non-wearers had no easy way to compare salaries. That's why this is a step against discrimination: it bans a practice that can be used to discriminate (though it may not be used that way).

samschooler 5y ago

This is me arm chairing a bit, but I feel like the term "discriminatory practices" and not "discrimination" is the key here. One is a legal definition, and the other seems to represent something like "leads to discrimination" but not discrimination itself.

nickff 5y ago
Given your definitions, "discriminatory practices" seem like speculative scare-words. Edit: To be clear, I did not mean to accuse you of fear-mongering; I think the politicians are dressing this policy up to make themselves look better.

jshier 5y ago

If you don't post a range it makes it trivial to make lowball offers since the candidates can't know the difference. This is discriminatory since it allows radically different offers for the same position without the applicant or anyone else being able to check the behavior.

waynesonfire 5y ago
> This is discriminatory since it allows It also allows me to pay you less because you're not a critical thinker. But yeah, it's probably discriminatory. We don't want to hurt your ego.
- bigbillheck 5y ago
  I thought personal attacks weren't encouraged on this forum.
- toss1 5y ago
  If "critical thinker" is part of the job requirement, you need to be able to measure and screen for that quality/capability. If you can't figure out how to design your screening to objectively measure, sort, & select for that desired criteria, you have no business discriminating pay rates based on it. And if you CAN & DO have a screening system that does so, you can prove you are not discriminating by making offers strongly correlated to scores in your screening system, e.g., "Strong candidates get offers $X-$Y, Exceptional=115% of Strong, Good=85% of Strong, Acceptable = 75%, lower=no offer" (presuming your screening system doesn't also include other explicitly/implicitly discriminatory criteria).

geofft 5y ago

I would guess the important thing here is "it is subject to the same penalties as the things we previously said enable discriminatory practices, and so we get to reuse that abstraction," not so much "we believe, as an abstract political argument, that this is in fact discrimination." It's like how a pidfd is a file descriptor. Is Linux saying a process is a file? No, but it's saying that the usual things that apply to file descriptors - how you pass them around, how you name them, etc. - also apply to pidfds, and anything that works with file descriptors in the future should probably also work with pidfds. It's not saying that OS professors should teach "Really, a process is a kind of file." In the same way, philosophy professors should not, on the basis of this law alone, say "Really, refusing to post salary ranges is discrimination." (And a "discriminatory practice" is a specific abstraction separate from but usually connected with "discrimination" in much the same way that a "file descriptor" is a specific abstraction separate from but usually connected with "files".)

seoaeu 5y ago
You can also think of it as code reuse. There is already a law that says “if company X engages in discriminatory practices, then apply penalty Y”, so now that can just be reused

dragonwriter 5y ago

> How is not disclosing a salary range in itself discriminatory? It's discriminatory as a matter of law because the law defining it says so. It's practically not inherently discriminatory, but it's a technique which increases the opportunity and difficulty of proving arbitrary discrimination, including on prohibited grounds, and which serves no other purpose other than enabling difficult to certainly identify (by the target) discrimination (both on prohibited grounds and otherwise).