Recently enacted Equal Pay Transparency (EPT) laws will affect compliance with mandatory recruitment on PERM Labor Certification cases. Companies must stay on top of these new EPT requirements, as well as additional states that might follow suit in the near future with EPT laws of their own.
New York City’s EPT law recently went into effect on Tuesday, November 1st. The law requires New York City employers to include salary ranges in job postings. Employers with more than four employees and at least one employee based in the city are subject to the law as well as all employment agencies operating in the city, regardless of employee count. Violators of the law will have 30 days to correct their actions, either through changing the job posting, paying damages to employees, or undergoing training. Noncompliant employers can be charged up to $250,000 in fines.
The NYC legislation is the latest EPT law to go into effect in the U.S. Colorado implemented an EPT law in January 2021, and California and Washington state passed EPT laws that will go into effect in January 2023. Meanwhile, New Jersey, Ohio, Connecticut, Maryland, and Nevada EPT rules are already in place.
EPT laws were passed in an effort to protect employees from pay discrimination, but employers interested in sponsoring the green card process for foreign national employees will also be impacted by the passage of such laws. The PERM labor certification is often the first step in the employment-based green card process, and requires a U.S. employer interested in hiring a foreign national to “test the labor market” by conducting recruitment to show that there are no qualified, willing, and available U.S. workers to assume the job opportunity. Although the PERM regulations do not explicitly state that salary must be disclosed in job postings, it is prudent for employers testing the labor market for PERM purposes to comply and disclose salary information. Thus far, only the state of Colorado has exempted PERM labor market test job postings from its EPT law.
Companies filing cases in any of these states or localities should consider whether to only provide salary information in locations subject to EPT laws, or whether it makes sense to do it on all cases. It’s possible that more states will enact EPT laws in the future.
If you are unsure of whether your business is currently or will be impacted by EPT laws, please contact us at: info@grahamadair.com; (408) 715-7067.