The subject of equal pay has been in the news a lot during the last couple of years following the introduction of The Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations on 6th April 2017.
The Regulations impose an obligation on certain employers (those with 250 employees or more) to report their overall gender pay gap (calculated using both mean and median average hourly pay) by publishing them annually on a Government website. They also have to publish the data on their own website for a period of 3 years.
Employees Discussing Salaries
As people become more aware of the new obligations on companies to report on the gender pay gap, inevitably interest generally in how employers pay and treat their staff is peaking. Flowing from this is the fact that employees are more interested in knowing what they are being paid, as opposed to their colleagues, who do a similar role within the organisation, and thus, may begin discussing their wages openly with one another.
Whilst employees discussing their salaries with one another could possibly lead to issues in the workplace, employers cannot legally stop their employees discussing their salaries with each other.
In addition to making it discriminatory for employers to pay men and women different salaries for doing the same work, The Equality Act 2010 (in particular c. 15, Part 5, Chapter 3, Disclosure of information, Section 77), also states that an employer cannot:
- Discipline employees for talking about salaries; or
- Insert clauses into employment contracts that don’t allow employees from discussing their wages.
However, these provisions under the Equality Act 2010 are not designed to permit workers to publicly share details about their remuneration package or to brag about how much they are paid in comparison to a work colleague, as this could be deemed to be bullying a work colleague. The Regulations only protect employees from discussing wages with one another, if they feel it relates to unfair or unequal pay within the company.
How Nelsons Can Help
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