Companies may not disaggregate salaries by gender if the salary of a specific person is revealed

The Supreme Court has established in a ruling that Spanish companies are not obliged to disaggregate the salary data of their employees by sex when there are so few in a job that specifying whether it is a man or a woman allows, in practice. , your identification. The judges agree with a company in the telecommunications sector against the CGT union and remember that, today, the Workers’ Statute does not require that the salary record individualize what each worker earns, something incompatible with the regulations. of data protection.

The Social judges have studied the case of the CGT union that took to court the decision of the Ericsson company not to provide this disaggregated data even in work centers and scales where, as there were few workers, it was possible to identify the specific worker. what each salary had if the data were disaggregated between men and women.

The National Court ruled in favor of CGT in the first instance, although the ruling was not executed until the case was finally resolved by the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the company. The judges recall that the Workers’ Statute includes the obligation to disaggregate by sex the data on the “average values” of the salary, precisely to know if there is a salary gap between men and women within the company.

“The important thing is the comparison of women and men and not the individualized remuneration of each worker,” says the Supreme Court. But labor regulations, he adds, do not require “incorporating into the registry the individualized remuneration of all the workers on the staff.” If it wanted to do so, it would have to be established “unequivocally” in the law and, in addition, include guarantees so that the dissemination of this data to the unions does not violate Data Protection regulations.

In this case, the agreement between Ericsson and the majority unions had been to include “average and median” salaries in each position but as long as “there are three or more people in each sex, even if there were no people in the opposite sex.” The first ruling in the case forced the company to do so even though there were not that many people and now the Supreme Court establishes that this is neither included in the Workers’ Statute nor is it compatible with the Data Protection standard.