Social dialogue and implementing Equal Pay policy in Belgium: Between collective awareness, mixed understandings and structural limits of policy instruments

Reflecting heterogeneous national institutions in the EU, European policy instruments for gender equality in the labour market have, since their origins in the 1950s, balanced between a liberal strategy resting on individual ‘litigation’ and a collective strategy through social dialogue. In the case of Belgium, the state has mostly delegated the implementation of equal pay to the social partners, i.e. trade unions and employers. Applying the analytical framework of Gender Equality Policy in Practice (GEPP, Mazur & Engeli 2020), this paper examines how the Belgian social partners have implemented equal pay policy before and after the Gender Pay Gap Law of 2012, which was the first law that introduced a stringent screening procedure of sectoral wage classifications. The analysis is based on a wide range of documents of social dialogue and public institutions, and expert interviews. We find that EU and national equal pay policies have created a common awareness and have transformed social partners’ conceptions and actions towards more gender equality. They jointly implemented general and gender-specific wage policies through collective bargaining which have significantly reduced the gender pay gap measured as the aggregated pay gap based on hourly wages, following Eurostat. This measurement however hides a more complex reality of enduring gender inequalities, such as a continued undervaluation of women’s jobs and sectors, an overrepresentation of part-time work among women, a higher pay and employment gap for low-skilled and minority women, a gender pension gap… The paper concludes that the further reduction of the gender pay gap will depend on both social partners’ and European policy actions that aim to narrow the general pay gap, challenge the gender discrimination in the value of work (e.g. care work), and also address the increasing work-life conflicts of workers.