Employees in Finland will be able to find out their colleagues' salaries

The Finnish government, Prime Minister Sanna Marin, has introduced a bill that would allow employees to find out how much their colleagues are paid. But only if they feel discriminated against. The new proposal is part of the government's long-standing effort to reduce gender pay inequality, in which Finland, unlike the rest of Scandinavia, is lagging behind. The draft of the new law immediately provoked a wave of criticism both from trade unions, which demand even greater transparency, and from employers' organizations, which, on the contrary, claim that something like this will provoke conflicts in the workplace. However, the Finnish governing coalition, led by Marin, insists on enforcing the law and argues mainly about the differences in pay between men and women. "Central to our government's agenda is the correction of pay inequality," said Nordic Cooperation and Equality Minister Thomas Blomqvist. He also added that the cabinet would make sure that the proposal passed the parliament before the elections in 2023. Back in 2020, according to statistics, women in Finland earned 17.2 percent less than men. This result pushes the country up to 37th place in the ranking of countries with the smallest differences in pay inequality, far behind other Scandinavian countries. Of these, Norway is dominated by seventh place, Denmark in ninth place and Sweden in twelfth place. Finland has such poor results, even though it has been specifically pursuing this political agenda for decades. The report of the Finnish ombudsman Jukka Maarianvaara from 2018 justifies the causes of this situation, similarly to other European countries. They are mainly due to the segregation of the labor market with purely male and female positions, fathers who go on parental leave less often than mothers. Then there are women who do not promote as often at work as their male colleagues.