Excerpted from kctv5.com story by Kelli Taylor
Not long ago the city approved an ordinance removing criminal history off of job applications for Kansas City employers.
On Thursday, they voted to take salary history off applications for city jobs.
The decision came after about a dozen women’s groups came together to ask the city to stop collecting salary history in the hiring process.
They started the process in December and seven months later their request was approved. The city council unanimously passed the ordinance.
A co-chair of the Women’s Equality Coalition said not asking for pay history is the fair, right thing to do because it ends wage disparity with future hires and reduces legal liability.
She said there is no ordinance or state law in the Midwest protesting pay equity, but that that changes today.
“If you put it on there, then the hiring party can default to the lower range,” Alice Kitchen explained. “It’s not fair to you if you have higher education and more experience and skill and related value to that job then you should be paid as much as the same person, a guy who is in that same job.”
“What we really want to do is to show employers in the private sector that if we can do it, they can do it too,” said Councilman Scott Wagner. “Just as we had in the ‘Ban the Box’ discussion, the city took the lead and a couple of years later passed an ordinance, actually just recently, that applied to all employers in Kansas City, Missouri. So, we hope that we can show leadership in this area.”
The council said they will also ask companies who have contracts with cities to do the same. They’re also doing a gender study that will compare women’s pay with men’s pay by job category.