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Workers’ Councils: How PayAnalytics by beqom Helps to Secure Employee Rights
Workers’ councils and staff representatives are moving to the center stage of compensation management, thanks to evolving regulations like the EU Pay Transparency Directive. For HR leaders and Compensation & Benefits professionals, this shift is not merely a compliance burden—it's a critical opportunity.
By proactively engaging with the workers’ council and leveraging advanced technology, companies can cement a reputation for fairness, build greater employee trust, and secure a competitive edge in talent acquisition. The goal is to move beyond simply meeting legal requirements to truly embracing pay transparency as a driver of positive change, ensuring equitable outcomes for all employees.
What is the role of the workers’ council in pay equity?
The workers’ council and staff representatives play an essential and expanding role in establishing and maintaining fair pay practices, particularly under the EU Pay Transparency Directive. Their involvement ensures that pay equity efforts are transparent, objective, and meet the concerns of employees.
Key areas of involvement include:
- Defining fair pay criteria: They are integral to agreeing upon objective, gender-neutral criteria used to assess work of equal value. This ensures pay structures can be impartially evaluated.
- Requesting pay information: Workers’ representatives have the right to information on average pay levels for categories of workers, broken down by sex, on behalf of employees.
- Reviewing reports: They consult on the accuracy of the reporting on pay gap between female and male workers and have access to the methodologies applied by the employer to calculate these gaps.
- Joint pay assessment: They must be made part of the joint pay assessment process when a significant, unaddressed gender pay gap is found.
- Remediation: They are involved in the process of implementing remediation measures to fix unjustified pay differences.
- Protecting privacy: Where local law allows, they can access sensitive, individual pay data to advise employees on claims without disclosing actual pay levels, ensuring legal compliance while protecting worker privacy.
What is the role of the workers’ council in pay equity?
The workers’ council and staff representatives play an essential and expanding role in establishing and maintaining fair pay practices, particularly under the EU Pay Transparency Directive. Their involvement ensures that pay equity efforts are transparent, objective, and meet the concerns of employees.
Key areas of involvement include:
- Defining fair pay criteria: They are integral to agreeing upon objective, gender-neutral criteria used to assess work of equal value. This ensures pay structures can be impartially evaluated.
- Requesting pay information: Workers’ representatives have the right to information on average pay levels for categories of workers, broken down by sex, on behalf of employees.
- Reviewing reports: They consult on the accuracy of the reporting on pay gap between female and male workers and have access to the methodologies applied by the employer to calculate these gaps.
- Joint pay assessment: They must be made part of the joint pay assessment process when a significant, unaddressed gender pay gap is found.
- Remediation: They are involved in the process of implementing remediation measures to fix unjustified pay differences.
- Protecting privacy: Where local law allows, they can access sensitive, individual pay data to advise employees on claims without disclosing actual pay levels, ensuring legal compliance while protecting worker privacy.
What are the key employee rights outlined by the EU Pay Transparency Directive?
The EU Pay Transparency Directive introduces a series of new rights for employees aimed at ensuring equal pay for work of equal value and increasing pay transparency across the organization.
The core rights and corresponding employer obligations include:
Right to information on pay levels: Employees can request and receive information on their individual pay level and the average pay levels (broken down by sex) for comparable workers doing the same job or work of equal value.
Regular reporting on gender pay gaps: Employers must conduct regular reporting on gender pay gaps and, in certain cases, conduct a joint pay assessment if the unexplained gap is significant.
Protection against reprisal: Employees have the right to disclose their own pay without fear of retaliation.
Access to methodology: Staff representatives have the right to access the methodologies used by the employer to calculate and report on the pay gap.
These rights shift the dynamic, requiring employers to be ready to provide data-driven, objective evidence to back up their pay decisions and to collaborate with the workers’ council in the pay equity process.
How does PayAnalytics by beqom support the joint pay assessment and remediation?
The prospect of a joint pay assessment—mandated when a significant pay gap exists—requires more than manual data manipulation; it demands a sophisticated, objective, and auditable solution. This is where specialized compensation management software becomes invaluable, transforming a potential crisis into a manageable, data-driven process.
The right technology helps by:
- Identifying the gap: Using multivariate regression analysis, PayAnalytics by beqom acts as a fairness detector. It takes all relevant employee data—salary, job role, experience, seniority—to understand what legitimately drives pay. It then flags unexplained differences as a potential pay gap (for example, between male and female workers in similar roles).
- Providing objective methodology: The tool provides a consistent, objective methodology for analysis. This is crucial as workers’ representatives have the right to access the methodologies applied for reporting on the pay gap between female and male workers.
- Planning remediation: The solution translates complex analysis into practical, actionable pay adjustments. It allows employers to model pay increases to close the pay gap while balancing budget constraints and organizational priorities.
- Facilitating consultation: Reports generated by the system are clear, customizable, and easily digestible for both management and the workers’ council, ensuring that discussions during the joint pay assessment are fact-based and focused on evidence, not just opinions.
- Ensuring data protection: Technology can manage the complex requirements of data aggregation and anonymization. While the workers’ council may need access to some sensitive data, the system ensures that individual, identifiable pay information is protected in compliance with data protection laws.
Why is PayAnalytics by beqom the preferred solution for HR leaders and workers' representatives?
PayAnalytics by beqom is trusted by global organizations to handle fair pay across diverse regulatory landscapes. It is an independent, objective tool based on industry standards, offering a comprehensive platform that addresses the needs of both the employer and the workers’ council.
PayAnalytics by beqom empowers organizations to:
- Proactively comply with the EU Pay Transparency Directive and other global regulations.
- Ensure fair pay by using a transparent, objective, and gender-neutral methodology.
- Build trust through clear, customizable reporting that simplifies the complex issues of pay assessment for management and staff representatives.
- Streamline collaboration on the joint pay assessment and remediation, providing evidence-based insights that avoid disputes.
- Protect privacy while providing the right to information required by law.
Don't let the new transparency mandates turn into a compliance struggle. Equip your organization and your workers’ council with the clarity and data-driven insights needed to achieve proven pay equity. Request a demo of PayAnalytics by beqom today.
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