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Under a new Labor plan, companies with more than 250 employees will have to publish gender pay data and abolish pay secrecy clauses.
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Labor to force companies to disclose gender pay gap
09 March 2021
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9 minute read
Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese and NSW senator Jenny McAllister on Monday announced a plan to eradicate Australia’s gender pay gap by forcing companies with more than 250 employees to publish gender pay data.
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Labor’s pledge to narrow Australia’s gender pay gap — currently at 13.4 per cent, down by 0.6 of a percentage point in the six months to March — would require companies to report their pay data annually, before it would appear on a publicly listed and searchable website. Salary data published to the public website would allow users to filter data by gender and role.
For companies with more than 1,000 employees, salary data would only have to be reported every two years, with a view to get smaller businesses on board with the transparency tool over the next four years.
The plan would also legislate a right to 10 days paid family and domestic violence leave, a benefit Mr Albanese praised the likes of Qantas, Woolworths and Virgin for already having mandated.
Speaking on the plan announced on International Women’s Day, Mr Albanese said the tool was inspired by a similar program adopted in the UK, where the pay gap is “closing”.
“We know that overseas it has made a substantial difference already,” he said. “In the UK, for example, where the reporting has happened, in its first two years we have seen a closing of the gap as a direct result of that transparency.”
The new plan would also see Labor hand new powers to the Fair Work Commission to order pay increases for low-paid workers in female-dominated industries, as well as addressing and regulating the pay gap among public servants, for whom the gender pay gap is currently 7.3 per cent.
But the plan’s objective isn’t to enable state overreach in the private sector, Mr Albanese said, commending the efforts of select major companies.
“We are not advocating for the state coming in and determining specifically what wage individuals are paid, but the first step is accountability and transparency,” he said.
Mr Albanese said that workers should be paid the same for doing the same job.
“The Aussie sense of the fair go tells you that that’s the case,” he said.
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