The Ontario government is bringing in new labour laws that among other changes will force employers to disclose salary information in job postings — a move employment experts say is good for job seekers and employers alike.

“At a time when many companies are posting record profits, it is only fair they communicate transparently about how they pay workers,” said David Piccini, Ontario’s Minister of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development, in announcing a slew of updates to the province’s employment legislation

Among the changes are several targeting the hospitality sector, including new rules banning unpaid work in the form of trial shifts, and stipulations forbidding employers form deducting wages in the event of a dine and dash, gas and dash, or any other stolen property.

A major one will be a new requirement for employers in the province to include the salary range for the position in any job posting. British Columbia and Prince Edward Island both signed similar legislation into law in the past year and Ontario itself had planned to implement even stronger requirements than those outlined on Tuesday all the way back in 2018, but the legislation died when the Liberal government of the day was voted out.

Job seekers like Kawal Preet Kaur say the move is a step in the right direction and long overdue. She’s an internationally trained doctor who was a professor at a medical school in her native India, but she hasn’t been successful in permanently breaking into either the medical or academic fields in Canada after two years of trying.

While she says there are many frustrating reasons for that, one basic improvement to the process for everyone would be to require compensation details to be included in job postings.

All too often, a job seeker will second-guess themselves when asked for their salary expectation, because if the number is too high, they’ll be rejected, but if it’s too low “they’ll think that there might be some deficiencies in the candidate,” she said. “It goes both ways.”

It adds up to a lot of wasted time and effort for both sides. She estimates that from the moment the job-seeking process starts — from looking at job sites, filtering for the right jobs, tailoring a resumé and cover letter,  and going through the application, including a potential interview — it takes a full working day to apply for a job in a way that gives the applicant a fair shot at actually getting it.

Posting salary ranges “definitely helps employers and employees both because it saves unnecessary applications to those jobs.” As things stand, only about 37 per cent of all online job postings in Ontario last year included salary information.

Source: CBC News