The Commission has produced this series of guidance notes to help employers deal with the more common causes of unequal pay in the workplace.
The Commission recommends all employers carry out equal pay audits, but these notes are intended to help you identify your potential vulnerability to equal pay claims. An equal pay audit is the best and most effective way to compare the pay of employees doing equal work and it provides a detailed picture to identify and put right any unlawful pay discrimination. A new audit toolkit looking at equal pay on the grounds of gender, disability and race will be published on our website in the coming months. These supplementary notes are intended to help you identify your potential vulnerability to equal pay claims and will help you to sort out any problems identified by the audit.
Whilst every effort has been made to ensure that the advice given in this note is accurate, only the courts or tribunals can give authoritative interpretations of the law.
Most of the legal cases to date in the field of pay and reward have been made under the Equal Pay Act and relate to gender. However, pay discrimination, that is, pay inequalities without objective justification for the differences, is also illegal under the Race Relations Act, the Disability Discrimination Act, the Age Discrimination Regulations and the Part Time Workers Regulations. So, as well as looking at differences between men and women, it is important to consider other aspects of equality such as race, disability, age and contractual status.
Guidance notes
- Equal pay in practice - ten top tips for equal pay
- Equal pay in practice - like work
- Equal pay in practice - work of equal value
- Equal pay in practice - grading
- Equal pay in practice - starting pay
- Equal pay in practice - pay progression
- Equal pay in practice - competence pay
- Equal pay in practice - performance related pay
- Equal pay in practice - market forces
- Equal pay in practice - bonus payments
- Equal pay in practice - working time payments
- Equal pay in practice - pay protection - This note is currently being updated in the light of recent court rulings
- Equal pay in practice - benefits
- Equal pay in practice - pay audits and human resource and payroll software
- Equal pay in practice - conducting an equal pay audit in accordance with Data Protection Act principles.
- Equal pay in practice - responding to an equal pay questionnaire and requests for information during tribunal procedures.
- Equal pay in practice - pay and ethnicity
- Equal pay in practice - pay and disability