Barely 5,000 of the 30,000 companies with more than 50 workers required by law have already registered their measures for parity
There is no more time frame. The term agreed by the Government for companies with more than 50 workers to have an equality plan approved to help eliminate the gender gap has ended. It is a reality that men occupy the most responsible positions and women are concentrated in the lowest categories. Added to this is their majority dedication to family care.
To try to alleviate these and other inequalities, the Executive imposed the obligation of companies to have an equality plan, although it established a deadline to be able to develop it. Companies with more than 100 employees must already have one since March of last year (those with more than 150 have had this obligation for two years) and from this Monday, March 7, all those with 50 workers or more must have also with yours.
For this reason, from today the labor inspection will be able to sanction those who do not comply with fines that can range from 751 euros to 7,500 euros. And even this amount can rise to 187,515 euros if there is an order from the labor authority for the company to have one of these plans or if some type of gender discrimination is detected.
These sanctions can be very numerous since there are less than 5,000 companies that today have a registered plan, despite the fact that this obligation affects more than 30,000. In other words, only one in six complies with the law and up to 25,000 could be fined for it.
From CC OO they do recognize that “there are many open negotiations” and that they cannot cope, since most have called the negotiating tables “at the last moment”. Even the union laments that there are companies with more than 250 workers that have had this obligation since 2007 and are now beginning to elaborate it.
What must this equality plan contain to comply with the law? A plan of this type is an ordered set of measures in which the objectives to be achieved, strategies and practices are set, together with effective systems for monitoring and evaluating objectives.
Thus, they must contain matters such as access to employment, professional classification, promotion, training, remuneration, organization of working time, conciliation of work and family life, prevention of sexual and gender-based harassment, etc. The maximum term is four years, so it must be renewed at least every four years.
More specifically, the equality plan must determine the parties that agree on it, personal, territorial and temporal scope and contain a report on the diagnosis of the situation of the company or, where appropriate, of each of the group companies. And it is that although in principle each company must have its own and specific equality plan, if the negotiating commission gives the go-ahead, a single one can be made at a global level for all, yes, making a diagnosis for each company.
Remuneration audit
Likewise, all firms that prepare an equality plan must include a remuneration audit in it. There, in addition to collecting the salary information distributed by professional groups or categories, they must also reflect it by the groups of jobs of equal value in the company according to the results of the job evaluation.
In addition, they will include a justification when the arithmetic mean or the median of the total remuneration in the company of the workers of one sex is higher than that of the other by at least 25%.
Said plan must also define the quantitative and qualitative objectives, describe specific measures, execution deadlines and priorities, as well as identify the means and resources, both material and human, necessary to implement and evaluate each measure.
In addition, another plus for companies to have an equality plan is that having measures to guarantee effective equality between women and men favors organizations access to European recovery funds to alleviate the damage caused by the pandemic and by which Spain will receive a total of 140,000 million euros. On the contrary, not having one can lead to exclusion from public tenders.