Information in accordance with the Remuneration Transparency Act

Your employer is obliged to treat all employees according to the same principles and not to discriminate against anyone on the basis of gender. According to the Remuneration Transparency Act, he must tell you, under certain conditions, on the basis of which criteria and procedures your remuneration and the remuneration for the same or equivalent activity in the company will be determined. He must also tell you how high this salary is in comparison (median value of at least six people of the opposite sex).
You can make a request if you

• employees in the public and private sectors,
• civil servants of the Confederation and corporations, institutions and foundations under public law subject to federal supervision,
• Federal judges,
• soldier,
• for your vocational training,
• homework or assimilated to such employees

are.

It is important that your company has at least 200 employees. What exactly you can ask depends on whether your employer is bound by a collective agreement or applies a collective agreement or not.
If your employer is bound by a collective agreement or applies a collective agreement, he must, for your activity and the comparison activity you have specified:

• set out in detail the criteria and procedure for determining remuneration. If the respective remuneration components are regulated in the collective agreement or by law, a simplified answer is sufficient (but the collective bargaining or statutory regulation must be specified) and
• determine the amount of the average monthly gross monthly salary and for up to two separate remuneration components.
• The following applies to the declaration of the comparison activity: The comparison salary is calculated from all employees of the opposite sex who are classified in the same pay group as you). The prerequisite is that 6 or more employees of the opposite sex work in the comparison group. Otherwise, for reasons of data protection, you will not receive any information on the amount of the comparison fee.

If your employer is not bound by or applying collective agreements, he must:

• set out in detail the criteria and procedure for determining remuneration for your activity and for the comparative activity requested (a simplified answer is not sufficient),
• indicate the extent to which the comparison activity is predominantly carried out by one sex,
• if necessary, justify in a comprehensible way for you why your activity and that of the comparison group are not equivalent and to refer the information to an activity that in his opinion is equivalent
• if 6 or more employees of the opposite sex work in the comparison group: indicate the amount of remuneration as a statistical mean (median) of all employees of the other sex who carry out the comparison activity.
• give the reply in text form within 3 months.

In order to improve the transparency of pay structures, private employers with more than 500 employees are requested (but not obliged) to carry out operational procedures to review and establish equal pay. If he has carried out such an audit procedure with the participation of the works council, your employer must inform the employees of the results, for example at a works meeting or by publishing the results internally.

In addition, employers who are subject to management reporting obligations under the German Commercial Code and generally have more than 500 employees must prepare a report on equality and equal pay for women and men and publish it in the Federal Gazette as an annex to the management report.
If your employer violates the principle of equal pay, you can demand to be paid the same as the higher-earning colleagues with the same or comparable activity. According to the general principles of civil law, the employer is obliged to pay withheld benefits. If he is not willing to do so, you can claim your claims in court. The information from the right to information can help to enforce your claims.