Europe made pay a design problem

On June 7, a law across the European Union was supposed to end the phrase "competitive salary." The EU Pay Transparency Directive was adopted in 2023 and gave member states three years to write it into national law. The deadline arrived, and only 4 of 27 countries made it.

Italy, Slovakia, Lithuania and Malta had complete national legislation in force on the day. Greece followed on July 6, with most employer duties held back until November. Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark all missed it, several openly aiming at January 2027 or later. The European Commission has refused twice to move the date and has confirmed that infringement proceedings are available, which in practice means a long process ending in a fine the offending treasury absorbs without flinching.

So the current state of play is comic in a way that is also instructive. Whether a creative role has to show its money depends on where the candidate sits, not where the studio sits.

The same job, posted by the same company, is transparent in Milan and opaque in Madrid.

The directive requires that if you work nowhere near Europe, these rules still apply. Employers must give applicants the starting salary or the pay range, in the advert or before the first interview. Employers cannot ask candidates what they currently earn. Contract clauses preventing staff from discussing pay are void. Workers can request pay information broken down by sex. Pay now stops being a negotiation and becomes a document.

Now our industry is close to a worst-case for the old system.

Creative work has always been priced by feel, and creative careers have always advanced because someone decided privately what you were worth to them. Campaign’s survey of the advertising workforce found women paid around 8 percent less than male colleagues, which works out at roughly nine thousand dollars a year. Close to 70 percent of respondents had worked somewhere that pay conversations were discouraged. Almost half the women surveyed did not understand how their agency set salaries, and the men were not far behind.

None of that is primarily a legal failure, but a design failure, in the sense that it is a system producing an outcome nobody would have specified if they had sat down and drawn it on purpose.

Vague pay isn't discretion; it's a system running without a spec.

If you write job posts, pay attention to this bit. Having a salary band is brand communication, and it may be the most closely read sentence your studio publishes this year, because the people reading it are deciding whether to hand you their twenties. When a range is wide enough to drive a bus through, candidates read it as a business that either doesn't know what the role is worth or is hoping somebody undercharges. When it is narrow and real, it tells them something about you that no values page can.

The objections are fair and deserve naming too. Project income is lumpy, especially at small organizations, and committing to a number in March when the pipeline is uncertain in June is genuinely uncomfortable. Bands get gamed, with everybody posting the same defensive spread. Published ranges can compress pay at the top and remove the room to pay a standout properly. And then the objection nobody raises at the all-hands, which is that publishing a band means current staff find out where they sit inside it.

That one deserves a straight answer. If publishing your range would start a revolt, the range was never the problem. The pay was.

The directive also does not fix an asymmetry, and that shouldn't be overstated. Transparency helps most the people with the least information, which usually means the youngest and the newest, and it helps least the people who were already well advised. That is the point of it. It is also the strongest argument for doing it whether or not the law has reached your postcode yet.

We wrote recently about the distance between what businesses say and what they actually buy, and hiring is the cleanest test of it available to us. Studios say they want to invest in young talent and then run processes that reward whoever has the nerve to ask for more. Studios say distinctiveness is everything, then pay the middle of a market they have never measured.

A salary band is really a part of your culture deck with a number in it.

Practically, then. Define ranges by job family rather than by person, because people are how the drift starts. Stop asking what somebody currently earns, since that single question imports every underpayment from their last three jobs into yours. Write the range you will genuinely pay and keep it narrow enough to mean something. Be ready to explain what moves somebody from the bottom of it to the top, because under this directive employees can ask, and outside this directive the good ones ask anyway.

And if you are reading job posts rather than writing them, a missing number is now information. In 4 countries, it is a compliance failure. In the other 23, it is a choice.

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