Anticipating the Working For Workers Four Act, 2023: Increasing Employer Disclosures

Two Major Takeaways

The Ontario government’s proposed Working for Workers Four Act, 2023 is poised to greatly affect the job search landscape for prospective employees. Two major changes include:

1. Requiring employers to disclose expected salary ranges in job postings

2. Requiring employees to state whether artificial intelligence (AI) is used during the hiring process to screen, assess, or select applicants—which would be a first in Canada

These changes are intended to (i) increase pay transparency and (ii) ensure that workers are not being excluded from consideration for certain positions because of technological biases, respectively. For those currently seeking a job, these potential changes are highly beneficial for several reasons.

Salary Ranges

First of all, increasing pay transparency will help address the gender pay gap, by helping prospective employees avoid discriminatory pay patterns and potentially decrease the need for difficult negotiations. If they do choose to negotiate, prospective employees can still leverage salary information from other employers to ask for higher pay. Furthermore, being able to see what different companies are offering will give workers more data with which to ascertain a reasonable pay range to expect for the type of position they are recruiting for. Overall, candidates will be able to better tailor the time and effort they choose to invest into applying to particular roles.

A minor downside of this proposed change is that candidates might have previously been able to ascertain certain values embodied by a company depending on whether they chose to be upfront about salary ranges. Workers will now have to turn to alternative avenues to build initial impressions about a company, as the decision to disclose wage information will no longer be a differentiating factor.

AI Usage

Secondly, requiring employers to disclose whether AI was used in the recruitment process is beneficial for workers because there is a real danger of bias. Algorithms are usually trained on past data and if the AI is trained on a data set that isn’t representative, the algorithm would be unable to know how individuals from equity-deserving groups have done in the past and thus could not accurately predict their future performance. An example of this occurred when Amazon attempted to develop an AI recruiting tool that had to be shut down because the algorithm discriminated against women. For people who value a workplace that prioritizes EDI, knowledge of AI use may help candidates weed out companies who do not align with their own values. Similarly, they may choose to not apply knowing that their application may potentially come up against systemic, discriminatory barriers.

Overall, while the advent of these changes may present challenges for employers who may be used to hiding salaries to pay employees less, or who began relying on AI to speed up processes, workers in Ontario have a lot to be happy about if this Act passes.

-CT