Initiative

“Daddy´s index” “Pay the full day”

Summary of the initiative

The Swedish Confederation of Professional Employees (TCO) is a national trade union confederation of 14 trade unions in Sweden. TCO organises professional and other qualified employees within both the private and the public sectors. It has 1,3 million members of which over 60% are women. While TCO affiliated trade unions have their main focus on the contents in the collective agreements, the recruitment of members and what can be done at their workplaces, TCO is concentrated on promoting the needs and interests of its affiliated trade unions in the social and political debate and decision-making process.

When it comes to promoting gender equality, TCO’s current focuses is on promoting a more equal sharing of the parental leave, because this is considered a key factor for improving the work – life – balance as well as for tackling the gender pay gap. TCO believes that to achieve gender equality it is not enough to change the behaviour of women only. Instead TCO would like to see every worker as a provider and carer.

Today in Sweden women´s share of the work force is equal to men´s, thanks to separate taxation, affordable child care and parental leave linked to previous salary. That makes the Swedish model competitive in an international perspective. But still women in average work fewer hours than men do after having had a child. This is why we identify men´s responsibilities at home as an important factor for gender equality.

To promote an issue, TCO often use official statistics if available. To promote a more equal sharing of the parental leave, TCO each year publishes a “Daddy´s index”, a report on men´s share of the leave. Since it ranks the different municipalities from the best to the worst in the different regions of Sweden, this index is a very attractive topic for national media as well as for local papers, and brings attention to the development in their own region internally and compared to others.

Another initiative that TCO has carried out is “The Parental Leave Manual”, a booklet which gives good advice to help employers support their employees when becoming parents. More than 10 000 different employers ordered it. On the same issue an original initiative “Dad, come home!” has been carried out by Teaterförbundet, the Swedish Union for Performing Arts and Film member of TCO, consisting of a project whose output was a report. The initiative enabled the identification of good practices that provide technicians in the stage and film industry with opportunities to combine work-life and parenthood.

The other main focus area for TCO regarding gender equality is the gender pay gap. In Sweden as well as in many other countries women in average are more educated than the average man, but still they earn less than men. Wage differences between men and women need to decrease and education must be better valued, including for professions dominated by women. TCO organises large groups of professionals dominated by women who are paid less than what could be expected with regard to their level of education, responsibility and demands at work. This is why TCO prefers to talk about “wrongly paid professions dominated by women” more often than about “low paid women”.

To put the issue of the gender pay gap in Sweden higher up on the agenda, and to highlight the 8th of March, in 2011 TCO started a joint initiative together with other trade union confederations and trade unions representatives for the women´s organizations. The network agreed to focus on the total wage gap for full time work. Three years ago women´s wages converted to full time work was 86 percent that of men´s.

If you are supposed to work eight hours from morning until 5 ó clock in the afternoon, and we assume that women would have the same pay as men for each minute they work, then women worked for free after 15:51, every day. These figures we communicated mainly via a social media campaign that was named “Pay all day” or “Pay the full day”, using Facebook and twitter. https://www.facebook.com/Lonheladagen?fref=ts