Silence Has a Price Now, and It's €210,000
How the EU Pay Transparency Directive May Affect Your Business Soon Too
A regional labour court in Baden-Württemberg has just ordered Daimler Truck to pay a female manager roughly €210,000 in back pay. The case ran on a simple comparison: for the years 2018 to 2022, she was paid considerably less than the median salary of men at her own hierarchy level. The court did not grant her everything she asked for. It declined to match her pay to the single highest earner in her band. It did find the gap against the median was real, unexplained, and worth compensating, in full. Read that ruling next to another story doing the rounds in German HR press this same week and the picture gets sharper, not smaller. Coverage of the EU Pay Transparency Directive shows Germany missed its own June 2026 deadline to transpose the rules into national law. It also shows something more interesting than a missed deadline: the directive defines "pay" broadly enough to catch benefits, not only salary. Company cars, specifically. Among skilled workers, 12% of men get one, against 3.5% of women. When men do get a car, it is worth roughly €9,500 more, on average, than the one a woman gets in the same kind of role. Nobody voted for that gap in a meeting. It built up quietly, allowance by allowance, hierarchy level by hierarchy level, over years, precisely because nobody ever had to justify it out loud to a single person affected by it. SILENCE IS NOT NEUTRAL. IT IS READ AS GUILT, EVENTUALLY. That is the sentence I would put in front of any leadership team still treating pay tr…