Equality between men and women has been declared in France a “great national cause” of Emmanuel Macron’s Presidency in the wake of the #MeToo movement.
In March 2018, the French government unveiled an action plan for gender equality in the workplace consisting of ten measures aiming at reducing the gender pay gap and five measures to fight sexual and gender based violence. READ MORE
On April 5, 2017, the New York City Council passed an amendment to the New York City Human Rights Law prohibiting employers or their agents from inquiring about the salary history of an applicant. The law also restricts an employer’s ability to rely upon that salary history in determining the salary, benefits or other compensation during the hiring process “including the negotiation of a contract.” The term “salary history” is defined to include current or prior wages, benefits or other compensation, but does not include “objective measures of the applicant’s productivity such as revenue, sales or other production reports.”
There are several notable exceptions to the law. READ MORE
We set out below our best guess on where this leaves employees, management and HR in the UK.
Firstly as we have all heard repeatedly today, nothing is going to change immediately and that is the same for employment law. It will be years before any changes are made and for the time being, everything remains the same and critically, no one has to leave.
Much of our employment law is just that – employment law driven solely by the UK. We then have laws that have been enacted into UK law as a result of European directives – so those laws are the ones that may, at some point in the future, be targeted. Our guess at Orrick is that changes where they happen will be focused on consultation rights, holiday pay and working time. Worker involvement has never had the same traction in the UK that it has with our European counterparts and the UK has always viewed employee consultation with a degree of skepticism. For this reason, we think it may eventually be a focus for change.
In the heady days of the Coalition Government, gender pay gap reporting started to get some traction on the political agenda. This led to the 2011 initiative ‘Think, Act, Report’ which encouraged employers to voluntarily publish gender pay gap information. According to a Guardian article in August 2014, citing a parliamentary question from the shadow Equalities Minster at the time, 200 companies signed up to the initiative but only four of those ever published any data. £90,000 of public money later and we were clearly no further on.
