BU 217 Unit 8 recommendation with defense example

Post the Pay Range in Every State, Not Only Colorado: A Recommendation With Its Legal and Ethical Grounds, Its Strongest Objection and Its Price

Student Name

Business, Herzing University

BU 217: Business Ethics and the Legal Environment

Instructor Name

March 5, 2026

Post the Pay Range in Every State, Not Only Colorado: A Recommendation With Its Legal and Ethical Grounds, Its Strongest Objection and Its Price

The Recommendation

Front Range Outfitters, a composite outdoor-gear retailer with 1,200 employees in 34 stores across Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska and Kansas, should publish a good-faith pay range in every job posting in all four states beginning July 1, rather than only in Colorado, where the law already requires it. The recommendation rests on two grounds: the law permits it everywhere and requires it in the company's largest state, and the justice framework from this course supports it as the fairer practice.

Ground 1: What the Law Permits and Requires

Colorado requires employers to disclose, in each job posting, the hourly or salary compensation or range the employer in good faith believes it will pay, along with a general description of benefits (Colo. Rev. Stat. § 8-5-201). Front Range already complies for its 19 Colorado stores. Wyoming, Nebraska and Kansas have no posting requirement, but nothing in their law or in federal law prohibits disclosure. Federal labor law already protects nonsupervisory employees' right to discuss their own pay with one another, as part of their right to engage in concerted activity for mutual aid or protection (29 U.S.C. § 157), so the company cannot lawfully keep pay secret among its hourly staff in any state. Posting ranges everywhere simply makes the company's own practice consistent with what it does in Colorado and with what employees are entitled to share anyway.

The law also imposes a condition on the recommendation: ranges must be in good faith. A range from $15 to $40 an hour for a sales associate would comply in form but not in spirit, and in Colorado would invite enforcement. Each range should reflect what the company actually expects to pay.

Ground 2: What Fairness Supports

The justice framework asks whether a practice treats people fairly, especially those with less power, and whether the rule would be chosen by someone who did not yet know which side of it they would stand on. Hidden pay favors whoever negotiates hardest and whoever has the best information, which in retail usually means applicants who already know someone inside the company or who have changed jobs often. Applicants with less information, often younger workers and people entering the workforce, accept whatever they are offered. A rule of "everyone sees the range" is one applicants would accept from behind the veil; a rule of "those who know how to ask get more" is not. There is evidence that openness about pay narrows unexplained gaps: when Canadian provinces required public disclosure of higher university salaries, the gender pay gap among affected faculty fell by roughly 20% to 40% (Baker et al., 2023).

The Strongest Objection

The strongest case against the recommendation is not that competitors will see Front Range's pay; they largely know it already. It is that transparency may lower wages. A study of U.S. state laws protecting workers' right to discuss pay found that wages declined by about 2% on average after the laws took effect, and explained why: when every worker can see what others earn, employers become more reluctant to pay any one worker more, because doing so invites costly renegotiation with everyone else (Cullen & Pakzad-Hurson, 2023). On this view, posting ranges could compress pay toward the middle, hurting the strongest negotiators without helping anyone else.

The Answer, With Concessions

The objection must be conceded in part. Transparency reduces the premium that individual bargaining can win, and some employees who would have negotiated above the range will not. But the evidence concerns laws about discussing pay, not posted ranges, and its effects were smallest where workers had little individual bargaining power to begin with, which describes most hourly retail jobs. For Front Range's workforce, most of whom have never negotiated a starting wage, a posted range is more likely to raise the floor than to lower the ceiling. The concession shapes the implementation: ranges should be set from market data rather than from the current lowest rates, and reviewed each year, so that transparency does not become a way to hold pay down.

The Cost

Setting good-faith ranges for about 40 job titles requires market pricing, estimated at $35,000 for a compensation consultant in the first year. Publishing ranges will show some current employees that they are paid below the midpoint for their role; the human resources analysis found 143 employees below the proposed ranges' minimums, and raising them would cost about $210,000 a year. Managers will spend time explaining ranges to employees, perhaps two hours each for 68 store and assistant managers in the first quarter. The total first-year cost of about $250,000 is less than 1% of Front Range's payroll, and much of it corrects pay that was already out of line with the company's own standards.

How to Tell Employees

The way the change is announced will decide whether it builds trust or resentment. Employees below the new minimums should hear about their raises from their own managers before any posting goes live, so that nobody learns from a public job advertisement that a new hire will start above them. The announcement to all staff should explain what a range is and is not: it is the expected pay for the role, not a promise that everyone will reach the top, and placement within it depends on experience and performance under criteria the company will publish. Managers should be ready for the question every employee will ask, "Why am I where I am in the range?", with an answer grounded in those criteria. A company that posts ranges but cannot explain individual placement has solved half the problem and exposed the other half.

Implementation

Human resources completes market pricing by May 1; the leadership team approves ranges by May 15; employees below range minimums receive adjustments effective June 1, before postings change; managers are briefed in June; ranges appear in all postings July 1. The course text's point that ethical practice often means going beyond the minimum the law requires applies directly here (Crane et al., 2019): Colorado sets the minimum, and the company can choose to meet it everywhere.

References

Baker, M., Halberstam, Y., Kroft, K., Mas, A., & Messacar, D. (2023). Pay transparency and the gender gap. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 15(2), 157-183. https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20210141

Colo. Rev. Stat. § 8-5-201 (2025).

Crane, A., Matten, D., Glozer, S., & Spence, L. J. (2019). Business ethics: Managing corporate citizenship and sustainability in the age of globalization (5th ed.). Oxford University Press.

Cullen, Z. B., & Pakzad-Hurson, B. (2023). Equilibrium effects of pay transparency. Econometrica, 91(3), 765-802. https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA19788

Rights of employees as to organization, collective bargaining, etc., 29 U.S.C. § 157 (2025).