Social partners implementing equal pay policy in Belgium: Between collective awareness, mixed understandings and structural limits

Abstract

This chapter examines how the Belgian social partners, i.e. trade unions and employers, have implemented equal pay policy before and after the Gender Pay Gap Law of 2012. This law was the first introducing novel reporting duties for private sector companies and a stringent procedure for revising discriminatory job classifications at the sectoral level. The paper analyzes the various phases of the law, from its pre-adoption to its implementation and evaluation. The analysis focuses on the role of the social partners as the main stakeholders involved in the implementation of the legal principle of equal pay for work of equal value. The analysis is based on a wide range of documents of social dialogue and public institutions, and 18 expert interviews conducted in 2017 and 2023. We find that, over time, the social partners’ general and gender-specific wage bargaining strategies have significantly reduced the gender pay gap measured as the aggregated pay gap based on hourly wages, following Eurostat. This measurement, however, hides a more complex reality of enduring gender inequalities, such as a continued undervaluation of women’s jobs and sectors, an overrepresentation of part-time work among women, a higher pay and employment gap for low-skilled and minority women and a gender pension gap. Although the adoption and implementation of the Gender Pay Gap Law has created a common awareness and has transformed social partners’ conceptions and actions towards more gender equality, the law has, overall, accommodated existing gender inequalities rather than the gender transformation it proclaimed and feminist politicians and women workers hoped for. The paper concludes that the further reduction of the gender pay gap will depend on both social partners’ and European policy actions that aim to narrow the general pay gap, challenge gender discrimination in the value of work (e.g., care work), and also address the increasing work-life conflicts of workers.