Image: Flickr, BC Government / All employers in British Columbia will be required to provide transparent wage or salary information on all publicly advertised jobs starting in November 2023.
Transparent job postings in BC

All BC employers will be required to post wage/salary info for advertised jobs starting Nov. 1

Oct 30, 2023 | 8:44 AM

VICTORIA — All employers in British Columbia will be required to furnish transparent wage or salary information on publicly advertised jobs starting in November 2023.

According to a news release from the provincial government, B.C. employers will be required to include salary or wage information on all publicly posted jobs under B.C.’s Pay Transparency Act, which passed into law this year.

The act means B.C. employers are no longer able to ask prospective employees for pay history information or punish employees who disclose their pay to co-workers or potential job applicants.

“Ensuring employers are transparent about workers’ wages is the step we are taking,” said Harry Bains, Minister of Labour. “This, along with other measures such as increasing the general minimum wage and eliminating the unfair liquor-server minimum wage, which impacted mostly women, brings us closer to closing the gender pay gap in B.C.”

While improvements to the pay gap can be seen in recent years, according to Statistics Canada, women in B.C. are paid 17 per cent less than men. The pay gap disproportionately impacts Indigenous women, women from visible minorities and immigrant women. While average hourly wages for men were $35.50 last year, Indigenous women earned an average of $26.74 per hour, visible minority women earned an average of $27.44 per hour and immigrant women earned an average of $28.78 per hour.

Also starting in November 2023, large and medium-sized employers in B.C. will gradually be required to publicly post reports about their gender-pay gap. This requirement is being introduced in phases so the Province can work with employers and give employers time to prepare, as follows:

* Nov. 1, 2023: BC Public Service Agency and Crown corporations and public agencies with more than 1,000 employees (ICBC, BC Hydro, WorkSafeBC, BC Housing, BC Lottery Corporation and BC Transit)

* Nov. 1, 2024: all employers with 1,000 employees or more

* Nov. 1, 2025: all employers with 300 employees or more

* Nov. 1, 2026: all employers with 50 employees or more

Regulations have been developed to provide employers with more details about new reporting requirements and these will be refined each year based on feedback from employers. In developing these requirements, B.C. is looking at ways demographic data can be safely collected using the Province’s gender-and-sex data standard in keeping with the new Anti-Racism Data Act.