Job listings should display the salary or range - petition to UK parliament closes on 9 July 2025

Please sign this petition if you agree with it.

Legally require all job listings to show salaries upfront
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/700482/

"Legally require all job listings to show salaries upfront - We ask the Government to make it a legal requirement that all job listings show salary ranges clearly and upfront. We believe this would create a fairer, more transparent job market, better inform candidates and reduce time-wasting when searching for jobs.

Sources state that 35% of UK job listings don’t list salaries, wasting time and widening wage gaps in various fields such as marketing (People Managing People, 2023). Countries such as the U.S. (in states like California) and the EU already require salary ranges in job postings (HR Dive, 2023; Council of the EU, 2023). We believe that a UK law would ensure fairer pay practices, reduce disparities, and help candidates make informed choices, building a more efficient and transparent job market."

I've just found out about this petition six days before it closes which is a shame as I'd have wanged on about it constantly if I'd heard of it sooner! In the UK many job adverts helpfully include the level of the salary, this is usually a range (expressed as £31,645-36,245 sort of thing). This is clear and helpful. Too many jobs still say 'competitive' though which is fairly uninformative. 

I don't believe that any jobseeker is helped by not having the salary information. 

I run a large-ish (4.6k subscribers) mailing list and in ~2018 I decided to stop posting any job advert to the list that didn't have a clear numeric salary. While that means some jobs can't go to the list (it's a shame, and I'm not particularly happy about that) what often happens is that when I email the poster to explain they can go back to their boss / HR people and pass the message on... resulting in a numeric salary added to the email. Hooray. 

Legally require all job listings to show salaries upfront
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/700482/ 

 

Further reading
1. The Real Reason Job Ads Don't Include A Salary Range (19 March 2017) Forbes, by Liz Ryan.

2. "Theatres please please understand that advertising a job without a salary automatically makes working class artists think they can’t apply. @ace_national please have a word with your NPOs about transparency" (21 May 2018 - tweet is no longer extant so I've not included the reference as it looks like the author has shuttered their account).

3. "There is no good reason to post a job ad without a salary range. There are only bad reasons: 1. To keep current employees from learning they’re underpaid 2. To keep candidates unaware of the budgeted range 3. To use candidates’ salary histories as free market research" (27 July 2019) @humanworkplace (the author of the Forbes piece above).

4. Perspective: The EU Pay Transparency Directive (9 Jan 2025) Deloitte - this doesn't affect the UK

5. Pay transparency in the EU
 - "New rules on pay transparency should help tackle pay discrimination at work and contribute to closing the gender pay gap." - this doesn't affect the UK

 

 

Let's see if we can keep Permanent EU Citizenship, even if Brexit happens w @EUcitizen2017

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Vote, by 23 July 2019, for Permanent European Union Citizenship - this is an EU citizens' initiative. [Campaign website]

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1. Oooh! I've been a bit wary of all these Stop-or-Mitigate Brexit-themed petitions (I worry that we're diluting stuff) but this one looks more promising.

Even despite the europa.eu URL I greeted it with the same suspicion, but have since searched for the URL on Twitter to see who's been tweeting about it, and Guy Verhofstadt had so - real enough for me. The petition is just over a day old (it was registered in July 2018 but voting seems to have opened only on 22nd August).

2. In the UK we regularly see people sharing petitions to Parliament, which have this banner across the top of the page.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions

These can be created on Parliament's website by any UK citizen - if the petition reaches 10,000 votes then Parliament must respond and if the votes reach 100,000 then Parliament will consider it for a debate. It does not necessarily mean that the thing you're petitioning for will happen though.

3. The EU Citizens' Initiative (ECI) is an EU-wide equivalent of this (I presume each member state has its own petitions site but I only know about the UK one). Any EU citizen can suggest an ECI for consideration. For an ECI to meet its threshold it requires 1,000,000 votes overall and for minimum thresholds to be reached in 7 of the member countries. Each country has its own numeric threshold depending, I presume, on the number of people in its voting population.

The UK needs 54,750 votes and so far has 19,583 (35%) - so I think we'll probably manage 100% - but Germany would need 72,000 and has only 761 (1%), or Latvia needs 6,000 and only has 12. Early days though!

4. I've no idea if it's more likely that countries with smaller thresholds (Cyprus, Estonia, Luxembourg and Malta need 4,500) will be more easily reached than countries with larger thresholds (Germany has the highest but there are a few above 40,000) or if it's more to do with which countries are most engaged. Currently the votes are (not surprisingly, given it's less than two days old!) languishing at the 1 or 2% end of things for each country but the UK is already at 36% (20,001 votes) - another few hundred have come in while I've been drafting this. It's not too surprising that UK folk are currently the most engaged.

5. Here's what the petition website looks like, and where you can find out how many votes are still needed [screenshot captured at 3pm on 23 August 2018].

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/002/public/#/initiative

Note the English (en) to the right of the above image - with the drop-down arrow you can read the page in any EU language.

Threshold status is very much not yet reached, but there are a few months to go... the images below come from the Permanent European Union Citizenship's ECI page - you need to click on the 'More info' button to bring up the extra panel. You can see all countries' responses one one page or scroll through a 'gallery'.

 

More countries listed on the website.

6. ...And here's what info about the initiative looks like on the main European Commission website

http://ec.europa.eu/citizens-initiative/public/initiatives/ongoing/details/2018/000003

I hope lots of medical research charities will sign the #alltrials petition

UPDATE 9 February 2013: The AMRC (Association of Medical Research Charities) signed the petition yesterday morning - but of course I'd still like to see other health / patient charities (AMRC members and non-members) signing up.

Update 12 February 2013: A whole bunch of medical research charities have signed as part of a big gang of patient groups, including my beloved former employer Diabetes UK - hooray :D
http://www.alltrials.net/supporters/pin-statement/

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"Trials with positive results are twice as likely to get reported as negative results," Goldacre said. "You can't make informed decisions about which treatment is best for the patient on the basis of just half the results, especially as it's the unflattering ones that are withheld."
Source: GlaxoSmithKline to publish clinical trial data, The Guardian, 5 February 2013

There seems to have been widespread under-reporting of clinical trial data along with an incomplete record of registered trials in the first place. This makes it harder to track what happened next. It also means that healthcare professionals only have part of the picture available to them when looking at which medications to consider for their patients.

The #alltrials petition calls for all clinical trial reports to be published, not just the positive stuff.

I've heard of the petition mostly through following Ben Goldacre on Twitter where he's been enthusiastically tweeting about organisations who have signed, including a surprise entry from GSK (GlaxoSmithKline) today who are pretty much 'big pharma' by any definition, or haven't signed in the case of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, aka ABPI.

The Wellcome Trust has signed the petition and they are a big funder of medical research, they're also members of the Association of Medical Research Charities (AMRC) as are lots of other lovely charities and I hope those charities might also sign this petition.

Signing is A Good Thing and as Ben says in his recent blog post "The eccentric position is now not supporting alltrials.net. There is no serious defense for withholding information about clinical trials from doctors and patients. It is simply unethical, and it harms patients."

• Organisations who have already signed up to support the #alltrials petition

Click to visit the AllTrials site

It's important to have all the information to know which drug to prescribe (or which drug to take) but it's also important to know about other problems with drugs that might show up only after the drug is on the market when many more people are taking it. This is 'postmarketing surveillance' (the drug is now on the market and regulatory people keep their beady eyes on it to spot any problems).

Conveniently I heard a discussion about precisely this topic on Radio 4 this evening - Dr Margaret McCartney and someone from the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority) were discussing, with host Dr Mark Porter, how anyone - you don't have to be a doctor to do this - anyone can use the MHRA's Yellow Card scheme to report any side effect that they experience when taking any medicine.

The scheme was opened up to the public a few years ago - previously it had been just healthcare professionals that would fill these cards in. Now anyone can fill in the 'card' online. The MHRA has noticed that the number of these filled-in reports is dropping and is keen to raise awareness of the yellow card scheme.