This bill reenacts and amends RCW 41.06.157 to require the director to adopt and maintain a comprehensive, streamlined classification plan for all positions in the classified service. The plan must support agency responses to changing technologies and conditions, value workplace diversity, facilitate reorganization and mobility, consider pay rates in other public and private employment, and not require a two-year, four-year, or postgraduate college degree as the sole qualification except where a degree is legally required to perform essential functions. The text also explicitly recognizes persons legally authorized to work in the United States under federal law, including deferred action for childhood arrivals recipients, as eligible for employment unless prohibited by other state or federal law. The amended section lets an appointing authority and an employee organization jointly request that the director of financial management initiate a classification study. For institutions of higher education and related boards, the director may adopt special salary ranges to be competitive locally or statewide, and the director may conduct salary surveys of public and private employers to establish market rates. Salary survey information that identifies a specific private employer is exempt from public disclosure under chapter 42.56 RCW. This is an administrative procedural change to state personnel law rather than a criminal or penalty change. The director of financial management is named in subsection (2), but the chunk does not explicitly state that the term "director" in subsection (1) refers to that same office. The text appears to be only one section (Sec. 1) of a larger bill; no effective or implementation dates or enforcement mechanisms are provided here, and strike/markup notation in the excerpt means some amendment language or final wording is unclear.

If passed, the Office of Financial Management will be required to create and keep up a streamlined classification plan for classified state jobs that aims to make hiring and career movement easier, reduce strict reliance on college degrees as the only qualifying route for most jobs, and explicitly allow people legally authorized to work in the U.S. (including DACA recipients) to be considered for employment unless other laws bar it. That will likely change how individual state agencies and appointing authorities evaluate qualifications and may lead to more reclassification studies (which agencies or unions can jointly request), potentially shifting who is eligible for jobs and creating pressure on agency budgets if market-based salary adjustments or new competitive ranges for higher education positions are adopted. The director can also run salary surveys and use market rates to set pay ranges, and private employers’ identifiable salary data will be protected from public disclosure, which may make employers more willing to share pay information but will reduce transparency for the public. The bill names the director of financial management in parts of the text, but the excerpt leaves some uncertainty about exactly which “director” is responsible, and it does not include timing, enforcement details, or the full bill context, so the scope, costs, and implementation schedule for agencies and institutions remain unclear.