In 2019, I stood with hundreds of other people on the west steps of the State Capitol Building in Denver, in support as state lawmakers introduced the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, a bill to end the gender pay gap and prevent pay disparities for all workers in Colorado.

Also read: POINT | ‘Equal pay’ law backfires on Colorado

The Equal Pay for Equal Work Act helps Colorado workers by updating our existing Anti-Discrimination Act to implement new common-sense transparency measures: requiring employers to advertise promotion opportunities to all current employees, disclose a proposed salary range in all job postings, and not request an applicant’s salary history (although an applicant can offer their history as part of a negotiation), among other protections.

The bill passed through the state legislature with bipartisan support and was signed into law by Governor Polis in May 2019. The new protections began taking effect in January 2021, just a few months ago.

Since January, though, several articles in the Wall Street Journal and the Denver Post, among other publications, have noted how several out-of-state businesses have posted jobs for remote work and specifically excluded anyone in Colorado from applying. Some companies have posted job opportunities for remote work with a new disclaimer: “This position may be performed remotely anywhere within the United States except the State of Colorado.” In other words: Coloradans need not apply.

They do this so those businesses can avoid that part of our new law which requires them to post the proposed pay ranges for their job openings, in order to keep those pay rates low.

This is nothing new. Adam Smith, in his 1776 economic treatise The Wealth of Nations, notes how employers (which he calls masters) often conspire together against their workers to keep wages lower than necessary: “Whoever imagines that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and every where in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate. … Masters too sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labor even below this rate.”

We see this playing out right now in real time, with some businesses offering remote work to everyone except people in Colorado in order to keep from publicly disclosing their proposed pay rates, so they can keep those rates low, to the detriment of the workers.

This exclusionary tactic, though, raises the question: is our worker protection law hurting Colorado workers by denying them potential job opportunities? Is our new pay transparency requirement costing us money?

No, of course not. Colorado has 3.2 million workers competing for 3 million jobs in this state (creating an unemployment rate of just 6.2%, and that number is falling as more jobs are added back by the tens of thousands each month during this recovery from the pandemic). The less than 400 hundred remote work jobs being offered to everyone in America except people from Colorado have no meaningful impact upon our statewide employment rate or jobs numbers.

And in fact, if some nationwide businesses want to hire remote workers from everywhere except from Colorado’s highly skilled labor force, then that reflects poorly upon those businesses. We have good workers worthy of a good wage. Why would you not want to hire us?

Companies choosing to hire from outside Colorado in order to keep their wages low, advertise themselves as eager to screw over their own workers. Bad business decisions such as these are why we have worker protection laws, such as the Equal Pay Act: to prevent employers from exploiting workers. In other words: bad businesses need not hire here.

Ryan Macoubrie is the former chair of the El Paso County Young Democrats.