After the Pay Commission – inequality of pay is alive, so are the battles of interpretation

Abstract

In 2008 Denmark saw the biggest strike among public employees in the Danish labour market history. Large female-dominant groups embarked on notified strikes with demands for equal pay for women and men. The focus of this paper is the development after the strikes, and one of the results of the strikes, a pay commission set up by the government. The Danish Pay Commission differed from the Norwegian Equal Pay Commission in several important respects regarding composition and mandate. The paper argues that this difference is attributable to specific factors, including traditions and culture in the Danish negotiation and agreement system, the very active role played by the Danish Government and other prominent politicians during the conflicts, as well as a closed and inflexible Danish culture of debate as regards equality. After the conflict, the battles of interpretation from 2008 continue to rage, now in a slightly different form. It shows that the leading actors still display a massive resistance to pay equity in Denmark. The paper therefore underlines that to win the struggle for equal pay, fundamental understanding about gender and salary must be changed, and that the unions and other actors must form an alliance with equal pay as a separate objective.