Solo and Small Firm
The Practitioner VOLUME 30, ISSUE 1, SPRING 2024
Content
- Ask Your Peers: What Suggestions Do You Have For Fellow Lawyers In the Process of Going Solo? If You Had To Do It All Over Again, What Would You Do Differently?
- EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE & EDITORIAL BOARD
- Good Experts... Investigate Like Sherlock Holmes, Think Like Lawyers, Write Like Journalists, and Present Like Walter Cronkite
- Inside This Issue
- Letter From the Chair
- Letter From the Editor
- New Laws For California Employers
- Table of Contents
- The Corporate Transparency Act Goes Into Effect January 1, 2024 Some Important Points To Know
- Pay Transparency - Your Wages Don't Have To Be a Secret Anymore
PAY TRANSPARENCY – YOUR WAGES DON’T HAVE TO BE A SECRET ANYMORE
Marina Kats Fraigun*
California employment law is replete with provisions that are counter-intuitive. One such area of law is pay secrecy/pay transparency. Can an employer fire an employee for discussing their wages? The answer is a clear "no".
Under both State and Federal law, an employer is not permitted to take action against an employee for discussing their wages. However, these laws fly directly in the face of what most people believe to be true (and perhaps want)—that compensation is secret.
Pay secrecy is a workplace policy that prohibits employees from talking about how much money they make with co-workers. According to the Harvard Business Review, "… pay secrecy remains the informal norm or formal policy for roughly half of all U.S. employees..."1