Direct Request (CEACR) - adopted 2022, published 111st ILC session (2023)

Equal Remuneration Convention, 1951 (No. 100) - Sao Tome and Principe (Ratification: 1982)

Article 2(2)(b) of the Convention. Minimum wages. The Committee notes that the Government provides no information on wage-fixing methods and mechanisms used to determine and review the national minimum wages. In this regard, it wishes to recall the importance of the role of the minimum wage in the application of the Convention. As women predominate in low-wage employment, and a uniform national wage system helps to raise the earnings of the lowest paid workers, it has an influence on the relationship between men and women’s wages and on reducing the gender pay gap. The Committee stresses that when setting minimum wages, it is essential to avoid any distortion based on sex and/or gendered assumptions, in order to ensure that certain skills considered to be “female” are not undervalued. To achieve that, rates must be fixed on objective criteria, free from gender bias (in this regard see the 2012 General Survey on the fundamental Conventions, paragraphs 682-683). The Committee again requests the Government to provide:

• (i)updated statistics on the percentage of men and women who are paid the minimum wage and their distribution in the different economic sectors and occupations;
• (ii)information on any awareness-raising activities regarding the principle enshrined in the Convention for parties involved in fixing national minimum wages; and
• (iii)information on complaints for non-payment of the minimum wage that have been reported or detected by the labour inspectorate, and on the penalties imposed.

Article 3. Objective job evaluation. The Committee recalls that section 22(3) of the Labour Code provides that job description and job evaluation systems should be based on objective criteria which are common to men and women in order to exclude any discrimination based on sex. It notes that the Government maintains that conditions such as years of service, grade and other similar criteria must also be taken into account. In this respect, the Committee believes that there appears to be confusion between performance appraisal, which aims at evaluating the performance of an individual worker in carrying out his or her job, and objective job evaluation, which is to measure the relative value of jobs with varying content on the basis of the work to be performed. Objective job evaluation is concerned with evaluating the job and not the individual worker; it makes it possible to determine the value of categories of jobs in an enterprise performed predominately by women and men as objectively as possible. In this connection, the Committee draws the attention of the Government to paragraphs 695-709 of its General Survey of 2012 which concern the objective evaluation of jobs. The Committee therefore requests the Government to take measures to:

• (i)put in place procedures for the formal, objective evaluation of jobs, based on objective criteria such as skills, effort, responsibilities, and conditions of work; and
• (ii)ensure that work in the sectors and occupations where women predominate are not undervalued.