Ibec, the business employers’ lobby group, invests much time and energy ensuring that messaging from employers around workplace issues is seen as reasonable and in tune with prevailing political winds. All too often, it is undone by some of the very people it represents.
Earlier this month, Ibec was stressing how supportive employers were of the European Union’s pay transparency directive, which will require employers to disclose salary ranges in the workplace and toughen rules enforcing equal pay to address continuing gender pay gaps.
Nichola Harkin, Ibec’s head of employment law services, said there was widespread support among its members for the aims of the directive – although she did caution about the need to avoid heavy administrative burdens.
But in a survey of 500 employers by Mason Hayes & Curran solicitors, more than one in five Irish employers said bluntly that they considered the incoming rules to be an unnecessary burden.
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While the Government has no chance of bringing the full directive into force by the June 7th deadline, it is expected to greenlight a phased introduction of the new regime, starting with pre-employment obligations, notably including salary disclosure in job advertisements – anathema to many employers.
In truth, the headache for many employers is that they will now be forced to defend – or, more painfully, unravel – some pretty indefensible ambiguities in pay structures. And given the beneficiaries of those ambiguities are unlikely to accede to their remuneration being cut, those employers face the prospect of increasing the pay of some colleagues.
They need to show, as Mason Hayes & Curran employment law partner Ger Connolly points out, “that employees doing equal work or work of equal value receive equal pay based on gender-neutral criteria”.
If clarity and fairness is already a hallmark of recruitment and retention policy, a company will hardly have any burden to worry about.
The survey also found that almost half of Irish employers (49 per cent) had not even reviewed their policies on retirement despite imminent changes in that area.
Employment contracts at many companies have historically set 65 as the age of retirement in advance of new rules under the Employment (Contractual Retirement Ages) Act 2025, which are expected to come into force later this year, allowing employees to press to stay in work until they hit State pension age, currently 66.
As Kady O’Connell, another employment law partner at Mason Hayes & Curran, says, employers cannot simply hold the line and reject such requests on the grounds of what it says in the original contract. “Retirement ages must be objectively justifiable,” she said.
