You’d think that, now that we’re less than four months away from the official implementation date of the Pay Transparency Directive, we’d be bombarding you with updates on national implementation initiatives, right? And yet no, things are still fairly quiet on the pay transparency front.

There are, however, some developments to report, for example in Italy. Following a period of formal consultation with unions and social partners, the Italian government has prepared and issued its first draft of legislation implementing the Directive. The draft stays very close to the Directive, but there are some interesting add-ons worth mentioning:

  • When it comes to defining “work of equal value”, the draft emphasizes the role of collective bargaining in classifying duties.
  • During recruitment, employers will not be able to base offers on a candidate’s salary history and will be prohibited from asking about current or previous salaries during the selection process. The draft specifies that employers cannot obtain this information by other means either, even indirectly, through parties to whom they have entrusted the selection or recruitment process.
  • The information to be provided to candidates about starting wage will have to be provided “in notices and announcements advertising job opportunities”, which would seemingly exclude the option of communicating this information at a later stage of the process (but before the salary negotiations start), as allowed by other Member States.
  • Employers with fewer than 50 employees will not be required to disclose their criteria for pay progression.
  • The draft introduces a presumption of conformity: companies applying a National Collective Bargaining Agreement (NCBA) signed by trade unions representative at a national level will generally be considered compliant with the principles of objective job classification. However, employees can still rebut this presumption if they provide specific evidence of discrimination.
  • As regards pay gap reporting, the draft allows employers that adopt a unified group wage policy to provide information by aggregating data at a national level, where this allows for a more reliable representation of the data, also with a view to reducing statistical distortions and facilitating centralised management of compliance.
  • On the topic of data privacy (see also our previous blog on this topic), the draft is far from clear.  It reminds employers that data is to be processed in accordance with the principles of the GDPR, and then goes on to say that “employee representatives or the equality body shall advise employees on any appeals relating to the principle of equal pay without disclosing the actual pay levels of individual employees performing the same work or work of equal value”. Does this mean that the Italian legislator has picked up on the suggestion in the Directive that comparative pay information should only be provided to the employee representatives or the equality body (and not to the individual employee requesting the information) if there is a risk of disclosing personal data of other employees? It would appear this way, but further clarification is required.

Please note that this text is not official and may still be subject to amendments prior to its formal publication in the Official Gazette, particularly in light of the most recent official communication indicating that further consultations are scheduled for mid-February.

It goes without saying that we will keep you updated. Meanwhile, if you have any further questions around pay transparency, please visit our dedicated Pay Transparency Support & Resources page on our website or reach out to our team of experts.