All companies must have a salary record from today
14/04/21
Today, Wednesday, April 14, the compulsory registration in companies begins, where all companies must have a remuneration register between women and men.
La medida afecta a casi 1,5 millones de empresas, que son las que tienen asalariados, de acuerdo con el Directorio Central de Empresas (DIRCE) a 1 de enero de 2020 del Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE) aunque alrededor de 900.000 tienen solo 1 o 2 empleados.
The register should yield the average values of wages, salary supplements and extra-industrial perceptions of the workforce, disaggregated by sex and distributed by professional groups, categorías profesionales o puestos de trabajo según la jornada u hora trabajada.
This Royal Decree sets out the keys to the mechanisms for identifying wage discrimination between men and women (around 22%), basing the obligation of remunerative transparency on instruments such as the Remuneration Register, which is a document that will include average wage values, disaggregated by sex and distributed by professional groups, professional categories or positions equal or of equal value.
Each company must record in its register, also by sex, the arithmetic and median average of what is actually perceived by each of these concepts in each professional group, category, level, position or any other applicable classification system. In this way, all this information must be disaggregated according to the nature of the remuneration: base salary; each of the salary supplements; and each of the extra-industrial perceptions. In all cases, each perception shall be specified in a different way.
Article 28.2 of the Workers' Statute already lays down the obligation of the employer to 'keep a record of the average values of wages, salary supplements and extra-assessments of his staff, disaggregated by sex and distributed by professional groups, professional categories or jobs equal to or of equal value'. More importantly, labour regulations add that "workers have the right to access, through the legal representation of workers in the company, the salary register of their company".
Given the difficulties that some companies have had in drawing up these records, especially the smallest ones, the Ministries of Equality and Labour have created a tool that will be presented this week and will be voluntary and free, with the aim of simplifying the process.
Companies of more than 100 workers are currently required, while companies of 50 to 99 will be required from 1 March 2022. These audits should be included in the equality plans, which they must also have.
All undertakings required to make an Equality Plan shall include a remuneration audit there. The validity of such audit, in accordance with the legal regulations, shall be the same as that of the Equality plan, unless a lower validity is agreed.
To carry out these audits, the law requires companies with this obligation (currently all companies of more than 100 workers must have an equality plan and, as of 7 March 2022, all companies with more than 50 workers) must make a 'diagnosis of the remuneration situation in the company':
- An assessment of jobs. In such evaluation the company must make an overall estimate of all factors that occur or can occur in a job, taking into account its impact and allowing the assignment of a score or numerical value to it. The valuation should refer to each of the tasks and functions of each job in the company.
- Such job valuation should include possible triggers for task pay inequalities, as well as discrimination that may arise in the design or use of conciliation measures.
The relevance of other triggers for the pay dispute, as well as any deficiencies or inequalities that could be seen in the design or use of conciliation and co-responsibility measures in the undertaking, or the difficulties that working persons might encounter in their professional or economic promotion arising from other factors such as discretionary business actions in mobility or unjustified availability requirements.
In the event of wage discrimination between men and women, the company is fined between EUR 6,251 and EUR 178,500.
Although until now it was not required because there was no regulation detailing what those records should look like, as well as access to them. However, this has changed after the Government adopted this regulation last October, through a Royal Decree, which includes all the obligations of companies and adds that this registration will be fully enforceable from tomorrow, April 14, 2021.