Bill boosts salary transparency, tackles unfair compensation for women and people of color
BOSTON – State Representative Richard M. Haggerty (D-Woburn) along with his colleagues in the House and Senate took a strong step towards closing the gender and racial wage gap in the Commonwealth by passing “An Act promoting relative to salary range transparency.” The legislation requires employers with 25 or more employees to disclose a salary range when posting a position and protects an employee’s right to ask their employer for the salary range for their position when applying for a job or seeking a promotion.
“With the passage of this legislation, we are building on the 2016 Equal Pay Act and taking a very important step towards rectifying the persistent gender and racial wage disparities in our state while at the same time not overburdening small businesses with less than 25 employees,” said Representative Haggerty. “By ensuring pay transparency and empowering all workers, particularly those from historically marginalized communities, we’re not only fulfilling a moral imperative but also making our Commonwealth more competitive with other states. I want to thank my colleagues in both the House and Senate, and the many organizations who worked hard to make this legislation a reality.”
Once enacted, H.4890 would make Massachusetts the eleventh state to mandate pay transparency by requiring employers to disclose salary ranges, according to the National Women’s Law Center. H.4890 builds on the Legislature’s 2016 passage of the Massachusetts Equal Pay Act, which prohibited wage discrimination based on gender and brought long-sought fairness and equality to workplaces in the state.
The bill requires employers with more than 100 employees to share their federal wage and workforce data reports with the Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development (EOLWD), which would then be responsible for compiling and publishing aggregated wage and workforce date to help identify gender and racial wage gaps by industry. The bill makes a necessary update, following the Equal Pay Act of 2016, to prevent earned wage adjustments from triggering the anti-spiking provision.
In Greater Boston, the 2023 gender wage gap was 21 cents, according to the Boston Women’s Workforce Council. This gap becomes more pronounced when comparing white men and women of color, where Black/African American women face a 54-cent wage gap, Hispanic/Latina women face a 52-cent wage gap, and Asian women face a 19-cent wage gap.
Having passed both chambers, the bill now goes to the Governor’s desk for her signature.
