Recently, because I’ve been dealing with a lot of administrative procedures related to burnout, I had a brief chat with HR and took the opportunity to ask about the much-discussed EU Pay Transparency Directive, which is supposedly taking effect on June 7.
I previously asked ChatGPT about it, and it said the biggest changes were:
Salary ranges must be disclosed during recruitment.
Employers cannot ask about your salary at your previous job.
Employees have the right to ask their company to provide the average salary for the same role, as well as salary data broken down by gender.
Companies with more than 100 employees must regularly disclose their gender pay gap, which cannot exceed 5%.
But in fact, HR told me that this is an EU requirement and that France does not yet have any corresponding legislation. However, their HR department has already started preparing this information. For example, they have begun analyzing data by gender and job level, and they will later make adjustments for employees whose salaries fall below the average.
I asked whether that meant they would also have to cut the salaries of employees earning above the average. She was horrified by my question and said that cutting salaries was impossible in France.
I looked into it afterward and found that the EU had already passed the directive in 2023, requiring all member states to complete the necessary legislation by June 7 this year. However, most countries have explicitly said that they will delay implementation, including France.
So France probably won’t formally enact the legislation until 2027 or 2028. We’ll just have to wait and see.