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This isn’t knowing what people are being paid. It’s posting the salary range for a position.

This is not that.

Mass is Liberal enough for free/good health care etc but not a living wage, I know it's a complex issue but there has to be some sort of solution to the rent n housing cost.

The solution is build more housing. Increase supply to keep up with demand.

Unfortunately nobody wants to lower their property value by having new denser buildings near them, or competition for renters. No landlord wants rents to go down. So they’ll fight every development and slow it down. Every time someone complains about losing the character of their neighborhood just know they’d rather you be homeless.

It matched inflation

Wages are up in the US 8.57%, so this 11% isn't some huge miracle, the law may have contributed to the above average performance, or just locality made the difference; Colorado is going to have a greater increase naturally than states with more farming and more government-heavy states like Virginia, where government salaries, set by union contracts, only increased 2.1%.

And by build housing, we don't mean 1m+ McMansions and 3k+ a month luxury apartments. Contractors only care about big profit operations now.

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The actual solution is to move west, not build upward, but nobody wants to do that.

Edit: Stop just downvoting and provide solutions and reasons you don't agree. How do you expect conversations or for people to change their opinions otherwise?

This is a very modest effect, given that US wages went up by a good amount during the time period in question. I think that pay transparency is a good idea in theory but in practice people's well-being can suffer. This is a good rundown on the psychological and economic pitfalls. The best argument I have read is that no matter what the pay distribution is, 50% of people will be below the median wage, and being in that 50% honestly feel pretty bad. Few of us humans think we are in the bottom half of our field or workplace, yet obviously 50% of us are. There is ample empirical evidence to support this point.

tl;dr This law didn't actually cause a huge jump in wages and also laws like this can make people pretty miserable and we shouldn't pass laws that make people feel sad.

A lot of the houses in my town were funded by the business in town. Unfortunately today a business can go almost anywhere so they can fight over the space and force the workers to deal with housing.

Luxury apartments are fine, pressure is still taken off existing housing. The only thing that matters is density.

Can't have state housing either bc cOmMuNiSm

Haha bullshit. I can talk of my town for instance.. Sturbridge is becoming a weird Frankenstein's monster of Luxury apartments going up (who the fuck would pay 2k+ a month to live in sturbridge) and the old poorer townies who they're trying to push out.

And these aren't even going up in the good part of town. Normal people still need a place to live and pushing them out of a normally affordable place to make investment properties isn't going to help.

After the rooster crows, the sun rises. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc. E.g. states having abortion bans also saw their wages rise.

However,

>Colorado’s pay transparency law, which went into effect Jan. 1, 2021, resulted in a 1.5% boost in the labor force participation rate compared to Utah, a neighboring state without such a law, according to an analysis by research hub Recruitonomics.

>In the same period, however, Colorado job postings on Indeed fell comparatively more than in Utah by a margin of 8.2%, the study found.

>“Salary transparency laws add another step in the process to post a job; as well as repel recruiters unwilling to divulge pay ranges,” Recruitonomics said.

>Recruitonomics noted the study is limited, but used Utah as a comparison due to the state’s similar demographics and economic characteristics.

Sauce.

“Run away from your problems”

You can't make rich people be poorer. If they want to live somewhere they will. Either they're going to out-bid the places that the townies live in now or they'll rent the nice new luxury places. Only in one situation do you have more total housing per sqft and less pressure on the housing market.

It's a studied fact that any kind of densified housing reduces overall rent prices in an area.

It’s amazing how people get so hung up on the term luxury condos/apartments. It’s still supply plain and simple as every single study indicates.

That is not at all what I'm saying, but if that's what you want to believe then go ahead. I feel like not enough people are considering the problems with having so many people in a small area, when there is PLENTY of land to the west not being developed or lived in.

The Eastern part of the state is absolutely saturated with people, the west not so much. We need to start spreading out more, and it's embarrassing a state as smart as this can't see that.

Move west? Like western MA? I used to have to work in Boston just to afford a place in Springfield. 3 hours of driving a day was shit.

It saves both potential candidates and employers/interviewers a significant amount of time by allowing candidates to just see that the pay isn't worth the position, thus they won't bother applying.

Many white collar jobs today require multiple interviews, especially in IT. It becomes a huge waste of time to have multiple hour long interviews over the course of a few weeks, only to find out the HR recruiter initially lied about the pay range to you.

This is likely correlation, not causation.

Dept of Labor published wage growth from March 2021 to March 2022, and while the Dept of Labor pegs Colorado at 8.8% for that period, other states exceed Colorado's growth like Wyoming (11.2%), Arkansas (10.9%), Indiana (9.8%), Nebraska (9.2%), both Carolinas (9.2%), Florida (10.8%), Maine (10.3%), Connecticut (9.2%)... And as far as I know none of those states implemented any new wage transparency laws. Another thing to consider is the relationship between wage growth and price inflation.

Wage transparency is probably a good thing, but probably not the cause of wage growth in Colorado. I think where Wage Transparency helps the most is in wage equity across sex and race, but that it's probably not a significant influence on wage growth and given the relationship between wage growth and inflation we should be cautious of linking transparency and wage growth.

Honest question, will large businesses like Zillow and BlackRock buying up houses make making new houses worthless? It sounds like kicking the can down the alley. We absolutely have enough houses, they're just being bought up by rich greedy bastards.

After seeing how badly our state legislators fucked up non-compete reform, I have zero faith they'd ever pass a pay transparency law that actually works.

As someone that left Colorado recently I can tell you that wages are not up nearly enough. It was my number one reason for moving away. The mountain towns just can't afford to pay a decent living wage

High speed electrified rail connecting the boonies to Boston would be so good for this. Imagine a 90 min train ride from the Berkshires to downtown. It would definitely stabilize housing costs in the region, though prices in “cheap” areas may go up and “expensive” areas may go down.

So there should be a federal requirement, so states are still incentivized to make the process fairer for their workers.

Yeah, that's a general finding for most business/commercial issues with respect to most worker or consumer protections: it's too easy to leave the state and set up shop across the state lines. This is really a federal-level issue, since this represents a coordination problem. People can make the same argument about the federal level, but the reality is it's much harder to leave the country to conduct business than to leave the state.

Vacancy rates are very low. There just aren't that many unoccupied homes. Even these companies buying property are largely renting them out. They aren't sitting empty.

The ability of these companies to make money is premised on a low supply of housing in high-demand locations. If housing supply increases, both market rents and housing values should fall or at least track below inflation, leading to these companies putting their homes on the market.

There aren't enough houses. Boston has been adding high-paying jobs like crazy, and those people need to live somewhere.

Where, exactly, should builders cut costs in order to make new construction affordable?

Yes, and with remote work being a much bigger thing now that gets rid of the commuting argument.

This is one of the reasons I always bring this up. Expanding westward would provide a lot of benefits, and also push for innovations like high speed rail to happen (we all know the state won't do it unless pressured).

The solution is to create more supply and end price gouging by landlords. Bloomberg law reported that some of the largest landlord corporations have been colluding to drive prices up. The only entity that can fix this is government, but even in MA government is pathetically weak-willed.

Of course people don’t want to lower their property value. Especially if they just bought a house. No one wants to be upside down ona mortgage. Even more so if they’ve done work. I’m not talking landlords though just home owners living in their own homes.

Since, I posted below the results of study that actually did a confounder controlled comparison, here it is again:

>Colorado’s pay transparency law, which went into effect Jan. 1, 2021, resulted in a 1.5% boost in the labor force participation rate compared to Utah, a neighboring state without such a law, according to an analysis by research hub Recruitonomics.

>In the same period, however, Colorado job postings on Indeed fell comparatively more than in Utah by a margin of 8.2%, the study found.

>“Salary transparency laws add another step in the process to post a job; as well as repel recruiters unwilling to divulge pay ranges,” Recruitonomics said.

>Recruitonomics noted the study is limited, but used Utah as a comparison due to the state’s similar demographics and economic characteristics.

Sauce.

Lol, no. I work remotely. They ask you where you live and your pay is based on the location of where you live and the cost of living of that area. So you won't be getting good pay if you work remote in that part of the state.

I just wish companies posted what the job paid, so you aren’t wasting your time if they offer way too little.

And I know quite a few people that work remotely for companies in other states but live here and get paid well.

Is this a big issue? This isn't something I've heard of most places doing.

You can get paid well depending on your field. But if the goal is to make the most money you can in your field, you have to live in a place with a higher cost of living.

None of what you have said has made a good argument against my initial point that to solve the housing/rent problem you need to expand west & not always build up. It would also solve or help alleviate many other issues. All of your points hinder on personal opinions and the company (and everything is on a company by company basis).

Moving west is only going to create a bigger problem. More traffic going east in the AM and more going west in the PM. Remote work isn't prevalent enough to fix that. You basically said "move where the job market doesn't pay well or drive 3 hours a day to make a good paycheck." If remote work was the solution your idea MIGHT play out well. But it's not the solution.

No matter what is done it will cause temporary discomfort and annoyance to somebody, no way around that. If traffic is the biggest issue you foresee then it is a fairly weak one, traffic will always exist and this would actually spread it out more.

The only valid point of your argument is that out west there aren't as many jobs that pay well...but there are some & overall that's a self-fulfilling prophecy because nobody wants to move out there and force that to start happening. There are still jobs though, and remote work is becoming more and more prevalent. All the issues people have with the western half of the state would start to disappear or get significantly better if it had more people moving out there.

There's no easy solution for all the issues the Eastern half of the state has, but people ignore one of them simply because of some crappy mindset. If people refuse to do things that would actually help the situation or offer solutions that make sense then wtf are you doing?

So tell me, what is the solution?

PS: Way to put words in my mouth.

Solution? More people should get abortions. We should have incentivized you genetics. Do not give tax breaks to those who have children. Tax them at a higher rate. 5% per child. Use that money to fund the infrastructure we need to support them. Those who don't have kids should get tax breaks. Extra week of vacation. Special lanes on the roads. Discounts on utilities.

I wish I could say this response was a surprise...

Anything actual to add?

You make a good point. MA is too small to be ignoring so much of it.

By size Massachusetts is the 45th largest state. We're ignoring far too much of a very small state, while being both very comfortable and somehow encouraging of that.

Agreed, wastes everyone's time. Every time a recruiter messages me about a job I might be interested in I ask them straight up what the pay range is for a qualified candidate. Those who don't provide one I usually ghost.