The event served above all to exchange with policy makers from the EU institutions and trade union practictioners from CESI about priorities for workers, and women-workers in particular, in matters of a new EU directive on pay transparency which was proposed by the European Commission last year.

MEP Samira Rafaela, co-rapporteur of the European Parliament, presented expected crunch issues in the negotiations on the file with the Counil; Eva Fernández Urbón from the Spanish CSIF union, President of CESI’s statutory Commission on Employment and Social Affairs, introduced a resolution of amendments that should, according to CESI, be pursued by the Euroepan Parliament and the Council to further strengthen the proposal of the Eruopean Commission. Romana Deckenbacher (Eurofedop), Vice-President of CESI’s statutory Commission on Women’s Rights, presented further insights about regulatory improvements needed to move further towards effective pay transparency in Europe.

Members of CESI made clear that, above all:

• in the European Commission’s proposal for a new directive, which stipulates that provisions on pay transparency should apply to employers with at least 250 workers, this figure should be reduced significantly in order to not exclude a too large number of workers from the scope of the directive.
• in the final directive, employers should be obliged to “provide” workers with information on their individual pay level and the average pay levels (broken down by sex, for categories of workers doing the same work as them or work of equal value to theirs) rather than workers having mere “the right to receive” it, as the European Commission has suggested.