In Italy the topic has gone by in relative silence, maybe because the effective application of the norm is still quite far away timewise and we shall only get round to it in due course. Or maybe because the EU directive 2023/970, which rules out keeping salaries secret, actually touches on a key aspect of the employer/employee relationship, a crucial interchange which leaves room for a wholly discretional exercise of power. The EU objective is sacrosanct and worthy of merit: to combat the gender pay gap, which still sees women greatly penalised at pay level, the legislators in Brussels have established that workers and their representatives are entitled to receive all available information on wage levels applied in the company, both individual and average. Obviously, companies will be obliged to reveal eventual differences in the salaries of men and women covering the same roles. And not only that: the EU norm foresees that no clauses must exist impeding an employee to make public his/her earnings or to ask for information on what other workers earn, and that salary level must be communicated in the job announcement or, at least, before the job interview. A norm which applies simple common sense? Well, of course.
There’s no need to go through the enormous piles of literature that have heaped up on the topic: the need to increase the participation of women in the world of work in order to improve the overall economy is, by now, taken for granted. So much so that, some days ago, the Wall Street Journal dedicated a long article to the risk that the Indian economy, potentially capable of overtaking the Chinese, will be unable to do so because of the scarcity of women in their world of work: having reached a peak of 31% in 2000, the percentage fell to a mere 24% last year.
So, too, is it a recognized fact that transparency is always a rewarding element: knowledge of salary level is surely a necessary piece of information conditioning the decision of candidates with excellent CVs, much sought-after by employers, to apply or not. Hence, it should be a winning policy in a situation in which there is a shortage of talent and attracting the most highly qualified should be a competitive advantage.
So why doesn’t this happen in real life? A sample survey, carried out by a recruiting company at international level, revealed that, out of 50 job offers, only 4% revealed the salary. Of course, the sample taken was very small but suffice it to go onto sites or the social network like Linkedin to observe that the trend is the same.
We may advance certain explanations for this, at least at the Italian level: the chronic diffidence of entrepreneurs, who fear they will favor their competitors by sharing their own information; the equally customary habit of downscale bargaining; an undeclared but extremely common attitude that considers investment in human resources to be of little importance.
What if, instead of a brilliant, pro-active collaborator, capable of critical thinking (and, because of this, a possible cause of disturbance), a modest executor, a tranquil “yes man” is preferred? Probably for this kind of profile, it is not necessary to state the salary in advance… indeed, transparency becomes a disturbing factor and renders the handling of the situation more complex.
So, if we look beyond the fashionable slogan that says that talented people are truly valuable goods, sought-after by everyone, we need to agree on how seriously we are willing to seek them, to integrate them and to adapt the organizational ecosystem to them so that they may be allowed to truly grow and be kept on over a medium to long-term period. If we really want to back talent, then one of the vital ingredients is surely transparency, which goes hand in glove with coherence.
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