Oregon is often listed as a “progressive” state, but in fact, has failed to keep up or institute some worker, job and wage pieces and are embarrassingly behind as of 2026:

• Washington and California both have statewide minimum salaried/exempt wages. As of 2026, the minimum annual salary an exempt(salaried) WA employee can be paid is $80,168.40, and in CA it’s $70,304. WA’s bill is particularly progressive and in the last 3 years has caught up to and now passed CA for the required state salaried minimum. New York, Maine and Colorado also have salaried minimum thresholds. Meanwhile, Oregon has…nothing for salaried/exempt employees and only toes the Federal line, current still at $35,536 since 2019 when a Texas lawsuit and corrupt judge clawed back an Obama increase to $47k. More on that history across presidential administrations since 2004 here but at any rate, it’s embarrassing Oregon hasn’t moved on this despite Democrats having total control–easy to see who pads their pockets.

• Oregon has no job posting salary disclosure requirements. Both CA and WA have required job posts to have the salary range in them as of 2023. Oregon, continues to provide employers the benefit of darkness where inequality pervades and employees invest the time and effort in application to jobs where by the time an employer may disclose the salary the grip of sunk cost may not leave the candidate with other options. This is embarrassing and could be easily fixed, the only people advocating against this are greedy, or incompetent–even a basic passage of this is not hard and decent employers already do it as they don’t want to waste candidates’ or their own company time.