Nicola Harkin

So the way the directive requires that it is is to be done on request.

But some employers might decide we'll have done all this work.

We'll have established our categories of employment.

Some employers might share it with all relevant employees or some employers might decide to do it on request.

So what the directive says is that an employee may request from their employer information as to their pay levels, pay levels within their category of work.

and broken down by gender.

So that has to be given to an employee then within two months of the request.

But you might find employers just sharing the information, not just on request, but sharing it once they have done that work.

It might be and I suppose that probably will depend company to company and certainly we're talking to companies who are taking different approaches to this and a lot of companies that we see are very committed to doing this well and to doing this right and within their communications with employees they're really communicating their investment into this piece of legislation and their buy-in into the piece of legislation.

So I think employers can get ahead of that

and make sure that their employees feel comfortable coming to them with that information, or if it's appropriate for the organisation, sharing it with employees.

Well, the first question you'd ask is, we know now the work is of equal value, but there's a different level of pay.

So the first question we have to ask is, why is the pay different?

And the directive does accept that there may be what they term as gender neutral reasons for differences in pay.

And the types of things that we would have seen as being gender neutral reasons for differences in pay would be things like length.

service, performance, maybe seniority, those kinds of things.

So the first question we will be asking is, is there an objective gender neutral reason for that difference in pay?

If the answer to that is no, well, then there may be an equal pay claim open to that individual to the WRC, appealable to the Labour Court under our Employment Equality Acts.

I would say the primary concern of our members right now is getting the information they need in order to put themselves into a position to make sure they're complying with the directive.

And right now they don't have that information because we haven't seen the draft legislation and we haven't seen the guidance we need.