L’Europa porrà fine alla “segretezza degli stipendi”: gli stipendi dei dipendenti saranno pubblici entro il 2026

What about dividends and capital gains ?

Finally!

It has been one year since the enactment of Directive 2023/970 of the European Parliament, also known as the Salary Transparency Law. This law will require all companies to make public the salary ranges of all their employees. In other words, you will know if your colleagues receive the same salary as you for doing the same job.

With this measure, the European Directive aims to strengthen equal pay between men and women for work of equal value, setting the gender pay gap at a maximum of 5%, compared to the current European average of 13%. The law came into force in June 2023, but its implementation will be progressive depending on the number of employees in the company until June 2026.

# Salary Transparency for Employees

The European Salary Directive imposes a series of requirements on companies regarding salary transparency that goes beyond their current workforce. Given that the main objective of the measure is to reduce salary inequality, companies will have to make salaries or salary ranges for each position public.

In addition, they will have to share with their employees the criteria used to set these remunerations. They will also have to provide information on salary inequalities within the company, broken down by gender.

# Job Offers with Salary by Law

The directive will also affect candidates seeking to join the workforce, as the European regulation will require companies to indicate the salary or salary range corresponding to the position in job offers. According to a [PayScale report from 2021](https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/Salary), only 12.6% of job offers published worldwide included the salary.

The regulations will prohibit employers from asking candidates about their salary range in previous jobs. In this way, one of the companies’ greatest bargaining chips for salary negotiation is eliminated, as they do not have a base reference on which to negotiate the candidate’s salary downwards.

# Employees Will Know How Much Their Colleagues Earn

As of 2026, employees will have the right to request and receive in writing information about their individual salary and the average salary ranges of colleagues performing the same job or one of equal value.

This request must be formalized through the legal representatives of the workers, works councils, or an equality body. In order to maintain competitiveness and privacy, the European directive sets access limits to the information, prohibiting the request of this information for purposes other than the defense of their salary equality rights.

However, the regulations leave a significant gap by prohibiting companies from imposing clauses in their employees’ contracts that restrict the disclosure of such information. Therefore, once the request is justified, the company would be exposed to employees disseminating that information.

this should have been a long time ago, i hate corporations so much it’s unreal

Transparency doesn’t only benefit employees, it most definitely will benefit employers too, with the former group having less capacity to adapt to the new situation of information symmetry than the later.

Get ready for some next-level, neigh impossible to prove collusion by employers, pushing salaries down in sectors with work that is incompatible with remote/hybrid work. Especially in countries where the housing market is overheated. And a long etc of other side-effects that aren’t mentioned in the article.