July 8, 2025
Updating the Fair Labor Standards Act to reflect the nuances of remote work, reforming arbitration and tackling the issue of salary expectations to further reduce the pay gap are all issues employment lawyers wish policymakers would tackle in the latter half of the year.
Here, Law360 explores what kind of changes attorneys would like to see in an ideal world.
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Reform Unwieldy Arbitration State of Affairs
Rebecca Ojserkis, an attorney with worker-side firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, said although she is not anticipating any movement on arbitration, she nevertheless thinks “we will probably reach a pressure point requiring some action.”
Some employers, who had opted for arbitration as the forum to resolve workers’ disputes, are now seeking to avoid that process when large groups of workers bring their claims in arbitration at the same time, Ojserkis said.
“There’s this tension that you can’t have your cake and eat it too,” she said.
Arbitration bodies, defendants and workers are starting to see that there needs to be a path forward to litigate claims.
“Whether that’s more consensus around what it looks like to have a mass arbitration, or whether that’s a departure from arbitration entirely and back to traditional litigation proceedings at a class and collective level,” she said. “But I think this is going to be a more frequent problem that hopefully we all can tackle together as time moves forward.”
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Salary Expectations as Next Equal Pay Frontier
Equal-pay reform in the last several years has taken the form of limiting the so-called factor other than sex defense for pay equity claims and requiring employers to disclose compensation information in job postings.
A New York bill may be a window into the next frontier: prohibiting employers from asking about salary expectations.
Many jurisdictions already have what are called salary history bans, which prohibit employers from inquiring about a job candidate’s prior pay.
But salary expectations can be a proxy for prior pay, Ojserkis said, as inaccurate pay expectations can backfire on workers.
“Your expectation is more likely to be tied to different people’s experiences. If you’re in a world of transparency, where you can see what a range for a job is or was, you can talk openly with your colleagues about what pay can be offered,” she said. “But at the same time, there’s an anchoring effect.”
Employers know the budget they have available for specific roles, and employers should be able to set objective benchmarks for how prospective workers might fall into a specific salary range, depending on their particular skill set, years of experience and other factors, Ojserkis said.
“I hope to one day get to a world where employers are not only not asking what pay expectations are,” she said, “but are not feeling like that’s a question that even needs to be asked.”