Roundup: New state pay transparency laws; Four day workweek; New state paid leave laws; Data and opportunity at work; AI and employment decisions

our states have new pay transparency laws going into effect during 2025—Illinois, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Vermont. They all have some requirement to post the pay in job ads. Want to know how to post pay in a job ad? Here you go.

The four-day workweek is a good idea. It's great for humans and pretty darn good for companies too. From an employment law perspective, the biggest issue in moving to a four-day week is overtime. But there may be some specific state rules that apply too.

Since the pandemic, many states have passed paid sick leave laws because having contagious diseases floating around workplaces is bad for employees, bad for productivity, and bad for clients who need help or service. And that's before you even consider the possibility of making customers (or clients or patients) sick too. All of it is bad for the bottom line.

We need to do a better job of understanding the decision makers and opportunity within organizations. For example, in pay equity analysis we look at whether people doing equal work are paid equally. This tells us a lot about the work and who and what we value. But it doesn't tell us about how and whether people move up in an organization.
California's New Independent Contractor Law

Most people have no idea what AI really is because we use the term broadly and apply it to things that are just plain old math with some fancy computing. AI is the jazz of technology. If you're not sure what it is, how it works, and there's often some unexpected improvisation, it's jazz. Or AI.