[T]he Senate gave preliminary approval Tuesday to a bill that would prevent employers in Vermont from inquiring about the salary histories of prospective employees.
H.294 passed the Senate unanimously. It has been championed by lawmakers, advocates and the Scott administration as a way to help close the state’s gender wage gap; women earn only about 86 cents for every dollar a man makes in the state.
“When women are offered salaries based on their pay at previous positions, on average, they will continue to pull in less money for the same work done by male counterparts,” Sen. Becca Balint, D-Windham, said while speaking about the bill on the Senate floor.
“In other words, this bill is a way of ensuring that disadvantages at one point in time don’t have ongoing consequences,” she said.
H.294 would prohibit employers from asking candidates or their former employers about their salary histories. It would also prevent them from interviewing job candidates based on their current or past salaries.
But it doesn’t prevent job candidates from disclosing salary information at their own discretion.
“It’s not forbidding those conversations from happening. So if a prospective employee volunteers to the hiring committee what they made at their last job then it’s fair game, then that can be part of the conversation,” Balint said in an interview Tuesday.
“What we don’t want is to persist in pegging women in particular at a lower pay scale due to their previous history, when we know their previous history was such because of various forces of discrimination within the workforce,” she said.
Gov. Phil Scott signed an Equal Pay Day proclamation last week to draw attention to the wage gap.
Scott endorsed H.294 and another equal pay bill, S.275, in a February letter to Speaker of the House Mitzi Johnson and Senate President Pro Tem Tim Ashe.
In addition to preventing salary inquiries of prospective employees, S.275 would also amend the Vermont Fair Employment Practices Act to extend protected status to employees based on race and sexual orientation. S.275 remains in the Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing and General Affairs.
Betsy Bishop, the president of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce, said she hasn’t heard of concerns over H.294 coming from Vermont businesses.
“From our perspective we have a really tight labor market right now and we need more workers and more people applying for jobs,” Bishop said.
“To the extent that this bill can help encourage more people to come and work here and apply for these jobs, we’re supportive of that,” she said.
A final vote on H.294 is scheduled for Wednesday, after which it is expected to return to the House.
