By the EESC Workers' Group

10 November was Equal Pay Day 2021, an opportunity to raise awareness about the gender pay gap which averages over 14% across Europe and climbs much higher in some countries. The trend is improving in some cases, while in others the current rate of improvement will deliver satisfactory results in a few thousand years...

Underpinning this difference is the issue of insecure employment, which generally affects women more than men (women hold 58% of all minimum wage jobs in Europe). Low wages affect all workers, but hit the most vulnerable hardest. One key way to close this gap is to raise minimum wages in Europe, ensuring that everyone earns a living wage.

As the ETUC shows, increasing minimum wages to 60% of median wages and 50% of average wages would cut the gender pay gap by 25% in Romania, 19% in Greece, 12% in Poland, 11% in Slovakia, and 10% in Spain and Luxembourg. This is yet another reason why strengthening the EU Directive on Adequate Minimum Wages is fundamental.

As the EESC pointed out in March this year, ensuring minimum wages are decent and strengthening collective bargaining is imperative to make society stable and innovative and promote wellbeing. However, living wages are also important for lifting people out of poverty and protecting them from it, and for improving the working and living conditions of vulnerable people, which sadly still includes women. The gap goes beyond wages to include pensions: the gap for retired people stands at 30%, as a result of the considerable differences in social security contributions over the working life of each group. In some cases, like Malta, this pension gap extends to more than 42%.

Civil society and the social partners, together with the European institutions and national governments, need to keep pushing to close this gap. It is an essential part of a broader campaign to secure social fairness and justice and build a better future for Europe. (prp)