Employment Law

Federal Labour Court strengthens equal pay: a single comparator suffi­ces – no “preponderant probability” required

Equal pay recalibrated: Federal Labour Court removes median and group hurdles

The Federal Labour Court has made clear that, to trigger the presumption of sex-based pay discrimination, it is sufficient to compare oneself with a single, better-paid colleague of the opposite sex performing the same or work of equal value. Additional hurdles such as a “preponderant probability” of discrimination, the size of the comparator group or median pay levels are irrelevant for the presumption to arise. The case has been remitted to the Regional Labour Court to examine whether the employer can rebut the presumption with objective, sex-neutral reasons.

Facts

The proceedings concern a long-serving head of department at Daimler Trucks who, after returning from parental leave, discovered that she was paid significantly less than male colleagues in comparable roles. She relied, among other things, on information from an internal pay transparency dashboard that displays median values for defined comparator groups by sex, and she identified a specific, higher-paid male colleague as her comparator. The Regional Labour Court in Stuttgart awarded her approximately EUR 130,000 in compensation for four years, but anchored the award in the median pay of male department heads and denied a claim to full alignment with the particularly well-remunerated comparator. The claimant, supported by the Society for Civil Rights (GFF), appealed to the Federal Labour Court against this limitation.

By Arne Ferbecki