Observation (CEACR) - adopted 1995, published 82nd ILC session (1995)

Equal Remuneration Convention, 1951 (No. 100) - Sweden (Ratification: 1962)

1. The Committee notes the information provided by the Government in its report, including the detailed statistical data, as well as the comments of the Swedish Council of Local Authorities and the Federation of Swedish County Councils.

2. While the Swedish Council of Local Authorities confirms the information in the Government's report concerning the 1993 Outline Agreement on Rates of Pay, etc. for National Government Employees which imposes on the parties at local level a special duty to ensure that pay differentials between women and men are gender neutral, the Federation of Swedish County Councils criticizes the statistical methodology and statistical analysis concerning county council employees. It considers that because the pay tables supplied by Statistics Sweden lack particulars of occupation, duties or age, they cannot be used to assess pay differentials between men and women in relation to education, actual work done and age. The Committee notes, however, that the Government's report does contain pay statistics for county council employees by educational level. This is supplemented by the statistics in the report which the Government commissioned from Statistics Sweden, entitled "Top salaries", which shows the average salary of women managers in county councils as a percentage of men's salaries, taking into consideration men's and women's dissimilarities in age and education through "standard weighting". These figures show that even accounting for differences in age and education, female managers in county councils continue to earn only 79 per cent of the salary of males occupying the same positions, compared to 86 per cent and 89 per cent at the level of central government and municipalities respectively.

3. The Committee welcomes the extracts of recently concluded collective agreements, supplied by this employer body, which include equal opportunities provisions. This confirms the information provided in the Government's report concerning the efforts, along the lines of Article 4 of the Convention, to promote the application of the principle of equal remuneration for work of equal value and to decrease the gaps noted above. The Government's report mentions, in particular, agreement at the level of national government employment for joint efforts towards developing systems for comparing equivalent jobs which resulted in the "TNS" (Tjangsgoringsnomenklatur for staten) classification system; the publication of gender-related TNS-based statistics for the first time in 1992; and the testing of local job evaluation systems against the "equal value" concept, to be evaluated by the parties at the central level. Measures such as these help, in the Committee's opinion, to promote the implementation of Article 1 of the Convention. The Committee looks forward to receiving follow-up information on the central-level evaluations, promised for the Government's next report on this Convention.

4. The Committee is addressing a request directly to the Government on other points.