Wage Adequacy and Pay Equality: Analysing the EU Adequate Minimum Wages Directive and the Pay Transparency Directive as Interconnected Wage Governance

The adoption of the EU Adequate Minimum Wages Directive (AMWD, 2022) and the Pay Transparency Directive (PTD, 2023) marks some of the most significant EU intervention in wage governance in decades. Though both directives respond to growing labour market inequality, they operate through fundamentally different logics: the AMWD addresses low pay through wage floors and collective bargaining institutions, while the PTD addresses gender pay discrimination through transparency, comparators, and individual enforcement rights. Existing scholarship has analysed these directives in isolation, reproducing a broader disciplinary divide in which wage governance, gender equality, and collective bargaining are treated as analytically distinct fields. This paper reads the AMWD and PTD together as interconnected components of EU wage governance, asking not only what each directive regulates but what forms of inequality each renders visible, measurable, and actionable, and which remain outside their shared regulatory frame. Drawing on qualitative document analysis of policy documents produced by EU institutions, trade unions, employer organisations, and research institutes, alongside interviews, the paper examines how key concepts of wage adequacy, transparency, equality, and collective bargaining are constructed and contested within and across both directives. The analysis identifies a persistent separation between wage governance and gender equality governance that limits the transformative potential of both instruments. While the AMWD treats gender equality as an indirect by-product of stronger wage floors, and the PTD addresses it directly but through a comparator logic bounded by the employment relationship, neither directive engages adequately with the structural dynamics feminist political economy identifies as central: the devaluation of feminised sectors, sectoral segregation, fiscal constraints on public sector wages, and the invisibility of care work.