(source: Sme)
In Slovakia it is not polite to ask somebody about his or her salary. When recruiting new workers companies do not commonly reveal the exact sums their future employees would receive in the offered positions. The latter should change since a trio of coalition Smer deputies have proposed making the publishing of the basic wage in job ads obligatory. Labour market experts expect that the new duty will lead to an increase of wages. Employers do not like the idea and add that for companies it would be easy to avoid this duty.
“It is populist nonsense impossible to implement in real life,” said Rastislav Machunka, vice-president of the Federation of Employers’ Unions (AZZZ), as quoted by the Hospodárske Noviny economic daily. “Companies will bypass it. For example, they will publish a range of the basic wage from €500 to €5,000 in the job ad.”
It was the trio of Smer deputies Ján Podmanický, Martin Glváč and Ľubomír Petrák who proposed the change within a revision of the Labour Code. Apart from this new duty the revision increases surcharges for night, weekend and holiday work. If adopted, the new duty should become effective as of May 2018.
The new duty should increase employees’ knowledge about the value of their work and thus increase pressure on the faster growth of wages.
Michal Páleník, director of the Employment Institute, expects this change in the Labour Code to reflect wages workers receive.
“The first consequence will be the increase of employee wages in positions for which companies are searching for new workers,” said Páleník, pointing to the phenomenon that due to the lack of qualified labour, newcomers sometimes get more money than people working in the same positions for a longer period of time.
It also happens in some companies that people working in the same positions receive different remuneration but since the employer prohibits workers from talking about wages among themselves, they do not have any justification to ask for a raise.
