In the fight for equality: blacklist against wage discrimination demanded

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From the middle of the current year, offending companies will be placed on a blacklist, Travailsuisse announced on Thursday. A blacklist entry provides information about compliance with the Gender Equality Act and not whether there is pay discrimination in the company, according to the relevant website respect8-3.ch.

Since July 2020, companies with more than 100 employees are required to carry out an equal pay analysis. By 30 June 2023, companies must have analyzed their wages for gender discrimination and communicated the results to employees.

checks and sanctions required

However, according to Travailsuisse, there are no checks on the analyzes or sanctions. That is why new measures such as the blacklist are necessary. The trade union federation is demanding that the former “tolerance threshold” of five percent be abolished. Companies with unexplained wage differences should be obliged to repeat the wage analysis. Companies that do not take effective measures to combat wage discrimination should be sanctioned.

As Tobias Bauer, head of economic policy at Travailsuisse, told the media, about 160 companies that comply with the Gender Equality Act are whitelisted by the respect8.3.ch platform. They employ about 450,000 people and have sent the results of their wage analyzes to the umbrella organisation.

95 percent of all businesses would be affected

Travailsuisse estimates that information is now available on about 18 percent of all employees in Switzerland. However, it was not about a representative random sample, but about companies that wanted to actively tackle the problem of wage discrimination and the majority of which were integrated into a social partnership, Bauer explains.

The results of this whitelist showed that about 95 percent of companies had an unexplained pay gap to the detriment of women. The maximum unexplained pay gap was 15.7 percent. On average, the unexplained wage difference in these ‘predominantly exemplary companies’ was 3 percent. This was below the 8 to 9 percent calculated for the economy as a whole.

For Travailsuisse, previous experience with wage analysis shows that companies mainly take effective measures to achieve equal wages when they are involved in social partnership. (SDA)

Source:Blick