Helsinki (05.05.2014 - Heikki Jokinen) In April the Finnish government introduced a proposal for a law making it compulsory for employers to report on gender pay gaps. This would cover jobs where women and men are performing the same work.
Should the proposed reform of the Equality Act be passed by parliament it will come into force at the beginning of next year.
The proposal will make it compulsory for companies with more than 30 employees to report to their personnel on the company equality plan.
The report must include information on classification, salaries and salary differences in respect of female and male jobs. Where there are differences, the employer is obliged to clarify to the employees the reasons for this.
More precise rules
When the Equality Act was renewed in 2005 this kind of reporting was included in it. There are still, however, problems executing the rules. The idea behind the new legislation is to make the rules more precise.
"The salary report is not just a description of salaries paid to men and women, but its goal is to expose possible baseless pay gender gaps so as to eliminate them", says Johanna Hautakorpi from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health when speaking to the newspaper Aamulehti.
The employer is obliged to conduct the salary report, but Hautakorpi stresses that it should be done together with the employees. The latter could choose their own representative to participate in the reporting work, someone like the shop steward for example.
Finnish law prohibits discrimination based on gender. It is the employers’ task to see that there are no baseless pay differences. An employee has the right to demand the same salary for the same work and, if necessary, to take the case to court.
Notwithstanding the existing legislation Finland is not doing too well in the Eurostatistics gender pay gap statistics. In 2012 women's gross hourly earnings were 19.4 per cent below those of men in Finland.
On average the figure was 16.4 per cent in the European Union. The figure ranged from 2.5 per cent in Slovenia to 30.0 per cent in Estonia.