It was like any birthday party with a cake, but none of the guests brought gifts. Instead, they celebrated the first year of Cleveland’s pay transparency ordinance by putting the law to use.
The ordinance requires employers to include salary ranges in job postings and bars them from asking applicants about their salary history.
Between bites of birthday cake, attendees scoured job sites on laptops, tablets and phones for postings missing salary ranges. They then filed complaints with the city’s Fair Employment Wage Board, which oversees the law.
By the time the Oct. 13 celebration ended, activists had filed 34 complaints, said Grace Heffernan, executive director of the nonprofit Northeast Ohio Worker Center, which was active in passing the ordinance and works with the wage board on education efforts regarding the ordinance and related laws.
“It was a mix of big companies that should know better and small companies that may not be aware of the law,” she said.
The ordinance officially turns one Oct. 27, and supporters say its first year has been a success. They point to such things as the wage board working closely with large employers, including the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals, to ensure their job postings include salary ranges. But the first year has also exposed the ordinance’s limitations. For example, Cleveland cannot enforce the law against public employers because as a municipality it doesn’t have jurisdiction over county and state entities. This means some of the city’s largest employers, including Cleveland State University and the MetroHealth System, aren’t covered by the law.
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Supporters of the pay transparency law say that it gives job applicants a better chance at negotiating a higher salary. Knowing a salary range makes it less likely for a job seeker to be low-balled, supporters say. So does forbidding an employer from asking salary history. Job applicants can negotiate a salary that reflects their skills and abilities, supporters say, and not what the last employer paid them. The ordinance covers employers with at least 15 workers.
Many supporters of Cleveland’s pay transparency law are hoping the ordinance will play a role in closing the wage gap, especially for women, Black and Latino workers. For example, women made 80.6 cents for every dollar a man made in the first quarter of 2026, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“The pay transparency law is written to be very easy to comply with so as not to be a burden to businesses, while also raising the bar on the pay of women and minorities,” wrote Matt Ashton, the wage board chair, in an email to Signal Cleveland.
Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo also have pay transparency laws. They are among nearly 30 cities nationally with them, according to brightmine.com, a human resources website.
Many employers believe pay transparency is a good thing, said Katie Soditch, HR director consultant for Connected HR, which provides human resources services for small and midsize employers covered by Cleveland’s ordinance and those in other Ohio cities.
“It was a little bit daunting to change how you post and how you do things,” she said of how some clients first viewed the ordinance. “But I think it’s helped us in a sense that we’re getting more qualified candidates.”
Qualified candidates often want to know what a job pays before applying, Soditch said. The salary range requirement has often motivated employers to revise job descriptions to more adequately reflect the positions for which they are hiring, she said.
Credit: Signal Cleveland
Other government employers don’t have to follow Cleveland’s pay transparency law
The partygoers huddled in a small room at Council Member Tanmay Shah’s ward office on Lorain Avenue in Cuddell. As they came across postings without salary ranges, one employer stood out – MetroHealth.
Some were ready to file complaints before Heffernan told them that they couldn’t. It’s a county government institution.
“It was very obvious to people that it is the only hospital not posting salary ranges,” Heffernan said.
Signal Cleveland contacted MetroHealth to ask why it didn’t include salary ranges in job postings. (It’s not required to do so.) “We have nothing to add to your story at this time,” a hospital spokesman responded by email.
Shah, who is on the wage board, said getting Cuyahoga County Council to pass similar pay transparency legislation is a high priority for the board. (Shah attended the pay transparency birthday party but had to leave before attendees began searching for job postings without salary ranges.)
Ashton agreed. He said a county pay transparency law would eliminate concerns some businesses and nonprofit organizations have raised about unfair competition from state and government entities that aren’t required to follow the law.
“The support of the county [in passing a pay transparency law] would assist in ensuring that companies couldn’t escape to the suburbs to avoid participating in the narrowing of the pay gap.”
Cuyahoga County President Dale Miller appears open to such legislation.
“Cleveland’s legislation provides valuable worker protections and helps ensure fairness in the workplace,” Miller wrote in an email to Signal Cleveland. “We should seriously consider passing similar countywide legislation.”
The partygoers scanned hundreds of job postings and only found a few dozen without pay ranges. They say that this could indicate that most employers are following the law. But it was disheartening that a major employer such as FirstEnergy appeared not to be adhering to the ordinance, Heffernan said. The publicly traded utility represented about one-third of the complaints the partygoers filed, she said.
Signal Cleveland contacted FirstEnergy for comment about the apparent violation. We will update the story with the company’s comment when we receive it.
Credit: Signal Cleveland
Cleveland has three worker protection laws aimed at pay
The pay transparency ordinance is among a trio of worker protection laws City Council, with the support of Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration, has passed in the last few years.
This included strengthening existing wage theft and fair wage/living wage laws. Employers can now be barred from city contracts if they engage in wage theft, which occurs when employers don’t pay workers what they are owed. Employers can also be barred if they don’t pay workers the city’s fair wage of $16.85 per hour. Council and the Bibb administration see all three laws as helping to build Cleveland’s middle class by increasing residents’ opportunities for higher wages and decreasing their chances of being exploited by employers.
“It is very cohesive and almost creates an ecosystem,” said Elfreda “Alfie” Walter, program manager to the wage board, of the set of laws. “What this city is doing is investing in its residents so that they can benefit because of these ordinances.”
This isn’t the first time the city passed laws aimed at protecting workers. The wage board was created in 2001 from an ordinance. However, it only met a few times and was dormant for more than two decades before being reconstituted a few years ago. The wage theft law basically went unenforced because there wasn’t a board or point person to oversee it. Cleveland’s living wage, which only affects city employees and workers whose employers have city contracts, stayed at $10 an hour for nearly two decades. It was increased a few years ago, with annual raises tied to inflation.
The enforcement of worker protections appears to have a better shot this time. Not only is the wage board active, Walter was hired last spring to assist in overseeing the three laws. The wage board formed a partnership with the worker center to do outreach to workers, which includes showing them how to file complaints at fairpaycleveland.com. The wage board also has a partnership with Collaborate Cleveland, an organization focused on gender equity, to do outreach to businesses.
Workers have been able to file pay transparency complaints since the portal on the city’s website went live last November. So far, 69 pay transparency complaints have been filed, 44 of which have been substantiated, Walter said. More than half of them have been resolved. The board couldn’t review about one-third of the complaints received because they were from county or other government employers not under Cleveland’s jurisdiction. MetroHealth and Cleveland State represented the majority of them, she said.
Employers who violate the pay transparency law can face up to a $5,000 fine. However, no case has reached the point of being assessed fines, Walter said.
“When the board has entertained formal complaints against employers, we bring it to their attention,” she said. “Almost overwhelmingly, it’s been, ‘Oh, we didn’t realize there was a new law. OK, we’ll fix this.’”
John Ryan, the consultant to the wage board, said the focus is more on compliance than fines.
“We’d rather not come after an employer for violating [the law] unless they’re continuing to violate,” he said. “Then they’re bad actors.”
In the law’s second year, Shah would like to see the city fine bad actors.
“A public dashboard is another way we hope to provide insight for workers, especially anonymous tips, by showing progress and giving the community a way to hold employers accountable, even when they might not be in the city,” he said.
Pay transparency is the first big push the wage board is making for the three laws. The scope of who is covered under the city’s wage theft and fair wage/living wage laws is potentially smaller. They only cover an employer that has either a contract with the city of at least $25,000 or has received $75,000 in financial assistance. The city has received two wage theft complaints, Walter said. One was resolved in favor of the worker who filed and the other is pending, she said. The city hasn’t received any fair wage/living wage complaints, Walter said.
The city will continue its outreach and education efforts, Walter said. Next week, the city is sending a postcard about the pay transparency ordinance to about 3,000 businesses. By early next year, employers bidding on city contracts will receive information about complying with all three laws.
Employers find merit in Cleveland’s pay transparency law
After the pay transparency law passed, the wage board’s strategy was to meet with some of Cleveland’s largest employers to explain the ordinance in hopes of increasing compliance. The rationale was that if they complied early on, it would motivate smaller businesses to follow suit. Hospital officials “voiced concern that while two of the major hospital systems were included, it provided unfair competition because MetroHealth was not included,” Ryan wrote in an email to Signal Cleveland.
Signal Cleveland asked UH about the meetings regarding the ordinance with representatives from the city.
“We comply with the ordinance,” reads a statement the hospital emailed to Signal Cleveland. “We hope that in the future all employers, including public ones, are required to follow the law so no one has an unfair advantage.”
Collaborate Cleveland, the nonprofit partnering with the wage board with outreach to businesses, contacted Soditch at ConnectedHR and Melissa Henson, director of talent services at ConnectedTALENT, which is part of ConnectedHR. Both appreciated the city seeking to form a rapport with businesses concerning the new law.
Henson said she often takes clients through a process before having them post salary ranges for a position. She gets them compensation data regarding what other employers are paying for similar positions. She also encourages employers to review what they are paying current employees in similar positions, especially if their salaries are below the ranges in the job posting.
“It’s a matter of internal equity,” Henson said. “If you have people within your organization who may not be at that level, you really have to evaluate whether there’s some adjustment that should occur.”
While the law bans employers from asking job applicants about their salary history, most HR professionals were trained years ago not to ask such questions, Soditch and Henson said. Almost no job sites or online applicant tracking system requires applicants to provide such information, the women said.
Still, Henson said it’s good the ordinance bans such questions. She used to work for an employer who routinely asked applicants their salary history.
“But then he took it a step further,” Henson said. “He would even ask us to provide statements of our W-2s to prove it, and he actually would rescind offers if people overinflated.”
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