The decision of the European Parliament in March on pay transparency has been cited by experts as a way of reducing the gender pay gap.
A recent change in regulations at the EU level will end "pay secrecy" and remove contractual clauses that can prevent workers from providing information on their salary or requesting information on the same or other categories of remuneration.
Most experts believe that such transparency will be a good thing and that evidence of pay discrepancies, which RTBF columnist Audrey Daco called “open secrets” in European companies, will provide the impetus to correct them.
“There is no reason why equal pay should not be paid for equal work,” Daco said in a recent article.
Daco’s RTBF colleague Raphaël Scaini added that gender pay discrepancies, as long as they do not exceed a margin of 5%, are usually tolerated in Europe.
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“On a salary of 2000 euros, this is 100 euros per month,” he was quoted as saying in the article “This is still 1200 euros at the end of the year, which is a tolerated wage difference between a man and a woman.”
Scaini suggested that the idea of a job or function should have a set salary regardless of ethnicity, sexuality, or orientation of the employee, and this should be set in the Belgian constitution to avoid “a witch hunt.”
