view
Abstract: The German Pay Transparency Act is an attempt to encourage employers to identify and reduce their gender pay gaps and enable individual employees to have access to the relevant pay information for the successful commencement of equal pay claims. It is thus aimed at addressing the inability of the existing equality litigation framework to effectively enforce the equal pay principle through access to information and positive duties without changing the substance of the equal pay claim or the legal scope of pay discrimination. Nevertheless, the act has led to a judicial paradigm shift in Germany and altered what constitutes a prima facie case of pay discrimination and what shifts the burden of proof. Particularly, the Federal Labour Court has adopted an EU conform interpretation in the light of the Pay Transparency Act that has been forty years in the making. With reference to this German experience, this article adopts a structural analysis that demonstrates how the powerful creativity of judges can give life and meaning to legislative initiatives by interpreting them within their broader context, allowing their concepts to spill over into related legal field. This analysis shows that the Pay Transparency Directive can potentially provide significant impulses for the Member States to address pay discrimination.
Keywords: equal pay; EU Harmonisation; gender pay gap; pay transparency sex discrimination
JICL welcomes full length articles (generally not exceeding 13,000 words inclusive of footnotes), shorter contributions in the form of notes and comments (generally not exceeding 8,000 words inclusive of footnotes) and book review articles of not more than 6,000 words.
We accept contributions for consideration on an exclusive submission basis. When submitting an article please certify that it is an unpublished article (that is, it has not been previously published in substantially similar form or with substantially similar content) and that it is not under consideration by any other journal.
To facilitate anonymous review, please give the names of authors and their short biographical information and acknowledgments in a separate page.
Authors retain copyright in the words used, but upon submission of material for publication, grant Sweet & Maxwell a licence to publish the submission in print and/or digital formats. Sweet & Maxwell retains copyright in the design, format and layout of all material published in JICL.
Once submissions are published, authors are entitled to one copy of the issue, 10 offprint copies and a PDF version of the submission.
Authors who send articles published in JICL to other publishers or media must include a reference to the publication of the article by JICL and Sweet & Maxwell.
Contributions and book reviews should be submitted in Microsoft Word format by way of email attachment to Professor Anton Cooray at Anton.cooray.1@city.ac.uk.
Authors should follow the OSCOLA citation system (http://www.law.ox.ac.uk/publications/oscola.php), except that we prefer authors to use indenting sparingly.
JICL uses the following heading levels: Main headings are in bold and preceded by a Roman numeral; second-level headings are in bold and italics and preceded by an uppercase alphabet; third-level headings are preceded by an Arabic numeral; and fourth-level headings are in italics and preceded by a lowercase alphabet.