EU | The EU wants to increase the transparency of wages, and the change also affects Finnish workplaces

Brussels

Finland the government tried to increase salary transparency in workplaces, but it went wrong. In August it was reported, that the preparation of the reform in question ends because the governing parties could not reach a consensus on its content.

Now there will be more transparency, but through an EU directive. To everyone’s surprise, the member states and the EU Parliament came to a preliminary agreement before Christmas on the wage transparency directive, which does not go as far as Finland’s reform would have gone, but still brings something new to Finnish workplaces.

Pending according to the directive, the employer must inform his employees of the basis for determining salary, salary level and salary increases. Even in Finland, this can expand the employer’s obligation to provide information, estimates an expert familiar with labor legislation Katja Leppänen From the Finnish Confederation of Business, EK.

According to the directive, the employer must provide an individual employee at his request with information about the average wage level of employees doing the same or equivalent work as him.

It is still unclear to what size groups of employees the limit of access to information will be drawn when the directive begins to be transposed into legislation in the member countries. In very small units, it would be easy to indirectly deduce what a colleague’s salary is.

The directive aims to clarify what “work of equal value” really means. It requires the state or labor market organizations to develop “analytical tools” for this. For example, Finnish law does not define the criteria for work of equal value.

In addition, the employer may not oblige the employee not to tell others about his own salary.

At least Companies with 100 employees must prepare a public survey of the percentage wage gap between the genders of their employees. In the EU Commission’s original proposal, the limit was 250 employees, but the Parliament wanted the limit to be lower.

In Finland, employers employing at least 30 employees are already obliged to draw up an equality plan. The plan must be made in cooperation with the personnel representatives, and its central part is the salary survey.

With the help of a salary survey, it is found out whether women and men are treated equally in salary and equally demanding jobs in the same way.

Directive stipulates that concrete measures must be taken at the workplace if reports show an unjustified wage difference of more than five percent. Current Finnish legislation does not define such a precise limit represented by numbers, but rather talks about “clear” salary differences.

According to the directive, injured employees could receive compensation for gender-based pay discrimination, which includes not only the lost salary but also bonuses and fringe benefits. This is already in Finnish law and will not lead to changes.

Similarly, there is already a regulation in force in Finland that the burden of proof is on the employer. In principle, it is the employer’s duty to demonstrate that wage discrimination has not occurred, if the employee suspects it.

in Finland the working group that considered salary transparency presented the employee with a broad right of access to his colleagues’ salary information. According to the proposal, the employee would have had the right to receive the salary information of one or more of his colleagues from the employer if he expressed that he suspected discrimination.

The broad right of access to information also raised contradictions within the government and was the main reason why the reform ended up in folder Ö.

The directive does not go nearly as far as Finland’s buried proposal. In the directive, the right of access to information does not extend to the salary information of an individual employee, but to the average salary level of those doing the same or equivalent work.

EK marched out of Finland’s group in the middle of its work, because the interest organization believes that the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health (STM), which leads the working group, violated the principles of tripartite law preparation and had decided the outcome in advance without further explanations.

EU Commission estimated when giving the proposal for the directive that there is an average of 14 percent between women and men in the EU pay gap. In Finland, the pay gap is about 16 percent. The biggest difference is in Latvia, 22 percent.

EU parliamentarian Sirpa Pietikäinen (kok) acted as the second chief negotiator of his own group EPP in the directive.

“It may sound boring and bureaucratic, but I consider it significant that the position of the European Equality Institute is improving. Now things are monitored differently in different countries, and the statistical models are different. Now the purpose is to see with the help of comparable data what the situation is in the different member countries.”

Pietikäinen also considers it significant that the parliament was able to lower the mandatory reporting limit to companies with 100 employees, contrary to the commission’s original proposal.

Finalization of the directive is underway between the lawyers of the Commission, the Parliament and the Council. It was finally approved in March–April. After that, you have three years to get the directive into the member state’s legislation, which means that in Finland it remains the responsibility of the future government.