If the Labor party gets in, they’ve revealed plans for legislation that would force companies with more than 1000 staff to publicly reveal any pay gaps in their company related to gender.
According to The Sydney Morning Herald the Labor party has sweeping changes in store for the labour market should they get into power. Along with forcing companies to reveal any staff gender pay gaps the Opposition “is preparing legislation that would also force companies to reveal the difference in pay between managerial and non-managerial staff, and would ban ‘secrecy clauses’ that prevent employees telling colleagues how much they get paid.”
Per the article, under current law, companies must report their gender pay gap to the Workplace Gender Quality Agency, but a Labor government would take this one step further by making that data available to the public.
The Opposition are also planning to make the pay gap between managers and their employers publicly available, The Sydney Morning Herald (The SMH) reports.
Australia’s national gender pay gap according to The SMH currently sits at “15 per cent, or $244.80 per week.” Which translates to the “average working women earn[ing] about $27,000 less per year compared to the average man.” This amount, per the article, increases to a “$53,000 difference for women in managerial positions.”
“The gender pay gap won’t fix itself,” deputy Labor leader Tanya Plibersek told The SMH. “Pay discrimination is not okay, so companies should not be able to hide it. More transparency will also reward companies that are doing the right thing,” Plibersek added.
Australia isn’t the only country working to provide more transparency around the gender pay gap with the ultimate aim to reduce it. Earlier this year more than 10,000 large companies in the UK were legally obligated to reveal the difference between male and female wages with the BBC reporting that 78 per cent of the companies who provided data pay men more and men are also paid “higher bonuses than women.”
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