Actance Tribune

What's NEW under French Employment Law?

N° 36 – March 10, 2025

One of my current or former employees exercises their right to access personal data: How to respond and what information to provide?

Companies increasingly receive data access requests from employees, sometimes in the context of disputes or negotiations. Refusing such a request can lead to significant financial penalties – up to 4% of the company’s global turnover.

On January 31, 2025, the CNIL (the National Commission on Informatics and Liberty) updated its guidance on employees’ right to access their data, including professional emails, especially for large requests.

  • What types of data employees can access

Personal data refers to any information identifying a person directly (e.g., name, first name) or indirectly (e.g., mobile number, license plate, social security number, email, voice, or image).

Employees can request access to various employment-related data, including recruitment records, career history, compensation details, disciplinary records, access logs from security badges.

  • How employees can request data

Employees—whether current or former—can submit requests to their employer, often via the Data Protection Officer (DPO) or Human Resources Department. No specific format is required, and employees do not need to justify their request.

Employers must generally respond within 1 month (Article 12.3 of the GDPR). If the request is complex or if multiple requests are received, the employer may extend the deadline by a further 2 months, provided they inform the employee of the use of this additional time within the initial 1-month period.

  • How data should be provided

According to the CNIL, employees can receive their personal data in one of two ways:

    • A copy of the document containing their data.
    • A faithful and understandable transcription of their data onto another medium.
  • Limits to the right of access

Access requests must also comply with:

    • The rights and freedoms of another employee’s data, trade secrets and intellectual property (Articles 12 and 15 of the GDPR, Recital 63, GDPR).
    • Confidentiality of correspondence
    • Data retention rules—e.g. requests can be denied if the requested data has been deleted in compliance with a data retention policy (Paris Court of Appeal, May 12, 2022, No. 21/02419).
  • Focus on accessing emails

If an email is marked « personal”, « private, » or includes similar wording (e.g., « family » or « vacation » in the subject line), it must be forwarded to the employee without being read by the employer.

The CNIL provides specific guidances on professional emails:

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A European Directive lays down new obligations in terms of transparency of remuneration

By 7 June 2026 at the latest, European Directive 2023/970 of 10 May 2023 aimed at reinforcing the application of the principle of equal pay for women and men for equal work or work of equal value through remuneration transparency and its application mechanisms must have been transposed into national law.

French companies need to anticipate these legislative changes to ensure optimum compliance as soon as the new provisions come into force.

The Directive provides for four main changes :

  • 1st change: transparency at the time of recruitment

There is an obligation to inform the candidate ‘in the job advertisement or in some other way’ of:

    • the starting salary for the position or a salary range;
    • the relevant provisions of the collective bargaining agreement for the position

The objective is to enable employees to negotiate their remuneration in an informed and transparent manner.

It also prohibits asking candidates for their remuneration history.

  • 2nd change : transparency during the employment relationship
    • The Directive requires employers to make certain information available to their employees in an easily accessible form (this could take the form, for example, of a charter or even a collective agreement setting out the company’s remuneration policy). These are the criteria (objective and gender-neutral) used to determine pay, pay levels and pay progression.
    • Employees have a new individual right to written information about the criteria (objective and gender-neutral) used to determine :
      • Their remuneration.
      • The Average pay levels broken down by sex or category of worker performing the same work or work of equal value.

The employer must remind employees of this right once a year. The employer must provide the information within a reasonable period of time, not exceeding 2 months.

The employer may require the employee not to use the information for any purpose other than to exercise his or her right to equal pay.

  • 3rd change : obligation to transmit data on pay differentials between women and men

Companies with at least 100 employees will be required (this obligation being implemented in phases depending on the number of employees in the company) to report data on gender pay gaps on a regular basis to a public authority to be specified in the transposition law. Publication on the website will probably also be required by the transposition law.

As part of the transposition into national law, Member States will have the choice to make companies with fewer than 100 employees subject to this obligation.

The data to be reported will cover :

    • the gender pay gap;
    • the pay gap between women and men in terms of variable or additional components;
    • the median pay gap between women and men;
    • the median pay gap between women and men for variable or supplementary components;
    • the proportion of female and male workers benefiting from variable or complementary components;
    • the proportion of female and male workers in each quartile;
    • the pay gap between women and men by category of worker, broken down by basic ordinary wage or salary and by variable or supplementary components.

The companies concerned will have to carry out a joint assessment of pay in cooperation with employee representatives when the data communicated reveals a difference in the average level of pay of at least 5% between women and men, whatever the category of workers.

  • 4th change : probable change in the gender equality index

In France, companies with at least 50 employees already publish an annual index on professional equality, but this will certainly have to change to take into account the transposition of the Directive (from total pay to differences in variable or additional components and from a point-based approach to a percentage-based approach).

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It should be noted that the Directive also provides for a reversal of the burden of proof: if the employer has not fulfilled his obligations to provide individual information and to publish pay data, it will then be up to him to prove that there has been no discrimination.

It is therefore necessary to anticipate the transposition of the directive, in particular by :

  • identifying the categories of workers doing the same work or work of the same value;
  • identifying any differences in pay, and, if necessary (in the absence of objective criteria), correct them;
  • setting up pay scales for the different categories of workers;
  • setting up the necessary information systems.

We remains at your disposal to help you with the above.

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