Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The Bill applies to all employees who meet the definition of employee under the Employment Equality Act. It is important to state that anybody who qualifies under that definition is protected under this legislative measure. As Senators know, that is a broad definition.

In terms of the detail that is required of employers in the types of analyses they will be undertaking and publishing on their own pay practices, in section 20A(1)(b)(i) to (viii) there is a detailed range of points upon which employers must report. In the context of requests that we add more, there are a significant number of points provided for under this legislation already. As regards how we will progress this, a point I neglected to make which would have been, perhaps, a more substantive answer to the previous discussion is that part of the proposal regarding the publication is to develop a website on which employers will put up their pay practices. That will be fleshed out further in the regulation, but we intend for the information provided under this legislation and under the regulations I will bring forward very quickly to be as publicly accessible as possible. That will have positive consequences for those employers who seek to improve their practices and negative consequences in terms of reputational damage for those who do not.

To address this set of amendments specifically, the publication of the breakdown of full-time and part-time staff may lead to employees being easily identifiable, particularly in smaller organisations. We must be mindful of the context of section 20A(8), under section 2 of the Bill, which provides that regulations may prescribe measures to be taken by the employer or the person who has access to information to ensure the personal data has undergone pseudonymisation before or when it is released. This pseudonymisation has the meaning assigned to it by Article 4 of the general data protection regulation and it means the processing of personal data in such a manner that the personal data can no longer be attributed to a specific data subject without the use of additional information, provided that such additional information is kept separately and is subject to technical and organisational measures to ensure the personal data is not attributed to an identified or identifiable natural person. A key element is that the more detail that is prescribed, that is, the additional details over and above those that are in the Bill already, the more it could allow for the profile of the pay of individual employees to be revealed when this information is published. The Bill is explicit in not wanting to do that. That is our concern about some of the amendments.

Section 20A provides that the regulations may require publication of the percentage of each pay quartile who are men and who are women, for example, the percentage of the most highly hourly paid 25% of employees who are men or women. This is less likely to end up in the specific identification of individuals. These amendments also seek to add a report on the difference between the mean and the median hourly remuneration of part-time female employees and full-time male employees expressed as a percentage, in addition to the existing provision for comparing male and female part-time remuneration. It is unclear what benefit this addition would add to the reporting. There will certainly be a large gap when comparing part-time and full-time employees.

Amendment No. 5 is unnecessary, given the reporting outlined under subsection (9), which would be more beneficial in this regard in addition to being less likely to identify specific individual employees. The amendments also seek to insert a reporting requirement for employers on the difference between the median hourly remuneration of persons contracted for services by a company or a public body of the male gender and that of persons contracted for services by a company or a public body of the female gender, expressed as a percentage. The Senator might wish to speak further to this, but I am a little unclear as to how this proposal differs fundamentally from the requirements of subsection (9)(a)(i) and (ii), which I intend to include in the regulations. The requirements of the Bill apply equally to public bodies and private companies and the amendments I brought forward in the Dáil have strengthened the Bill in terms of strengthening the definition of public bodies. This amendment is also unnecessary based on the content of subsection (9), which is also less likely to identify individuals.

I do not propose to accept this set of amendments. I believe we have detailed reporting provisions already. It is important that in the reporting process which we will establish we respect the fact specific individuals and employees should not be identifiable through their pay profile as a result of the reporting measures we are creating.