Pay for the Job, Not the Person: Salary Culture in the Netherlands vs. Tunisia

🇳🇱 Netherlands · 🇹🇳 Tunisia

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

The Netherlands is in the process of legally banning a question most of the working world still asks without a second thought: "what's your current salary?" Under the incoming EU Pay Transparency Directive, Dutch employers will soon be barred from requesting salary history at all, required to publish pay ranges in job ads, and obligated to hand any employee, on request, the actual average pay for their role broken down by gender. Tunisia, meanwhile, is a country where the average monthly salary sits around 500-600 euros, software developers can earn six to ten times that figure depending on employer, and the single most useful thing you can bring to a salary negotiation is not data — it's a personal relationship with someone who already works there. Both countries are, in their own way, trying to solve the same problem: how do you know if you're being paid fairly? They've just landed on opposite answers.

Do's & Don'ts

🇳🇱 Netherlands

🇹🇳 Tunisia

The Dutch approach treats pay as something the system should be able to defend, not something an individual should have to fight for. The incoming pay transparency law formalizes a instinct that was already culturally present — Hofstede's well-established Netherlands profile scores low on power distance (38) and notably low on masculinity (14), a "feminine," consensus-oriented culture that prizes quality of life and fairness over hierarchical status competition, which tracks with a labor market where a large share of jobs sit under CAOs that pre-negotiate salary bands collectively rather than leaving each employee to individually haggle. The famous Dutch directness compounds this: asking a colleague or a hiring manager directly what a role pays isn't rude here, it's simply how information moves, and it gives newcomers a genuine tool for calibrating whether an offer is fair almost immediately upon arrival.

Tunisia's salary culture runs on relationship and context rather than published bands. One Tunisian academic source's Hofstede scoring shows the country as unusually low on power distance (18) for the region and moderately individualistic (62), a profile that some researchers argue distinguishes Tunisia from the broader high-hierarchy Arab-world cluster — but in practice, day-to-day salary conversations remain high-context and indirect, mediated through personal networks that determine who even hears about the better-paying opportunities in the first place. The gap between sectors is stark and consequential: a secondary school teacher might earn 1,000-1,500 dinars a month while a software developer at the right company earns 5,000-12,000, and international NGOs — a major employer of skilled Tunisians and expats alike — have drawn documented criticism for paying local and expatriate staff meaningfully different rates for comparable work, a discrepancy that gets discussed quietly within networks rather than published anywhere official.

The reckoning: the Netherlands is engineering salary fairness top-down, through law, collective bargaining, and a cultural default toward directness that makes the system somewhat self-policing. Tunisia is navigating salary fairness bottom-up, through relationships, sector-specific reputations, and word of mouth, in the absence of anything resembling the Dutch legal infrastructure — which means a well-connected newcomer can do very well, and a poorly-connected one, however qualified, can badly underprice themselves without ever finding out what the going rate actually was.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — A software engineer with seven years of experience in the Netherlands, earning a gross €4,500 a month, asked outright whether they were being underpaid; the most useful replies didn't just cite a number but walked through how to check the applicable CAO scale first, since in many Dutch tech and engineering roles the honest answer to "am I underpaid" depends on a collective agreement most newcomers don't know to check.

Blind — A recurring thread type on Amsterdam total compensation, including specific posts benchmarking offers from companies like Booking.com and Miro, showed engineers cross-referencing real numbers openly with strangers online — a level of anonymous salary candor that several posters noted felt distinctly Dutch even in an international tech-worker forum.

Quora — Someone describing Tunisia's work culture for outsiders emphasized that it is "high-context," where "much of the message travels through the unspoken and the quality of the relationship," specifically flagging that indirect phrasing around sensitive topics like pay is preferred over the direct numbers-first approach an outsider might expect to use.

Nawaat (independent Tunisian media) — A widely discussed piece on local-versus-expatriate salary structures at NGOs operating in Tunisia laid out specific documented cases of pay discrimination by nationality for comparable roles, arguing that the practice was an open secret within the sector rather than a hidden anomaly, and one that local staff had limited practical recourse to challenge.

Conclusion

If you want a salary system that mostly protects you from finding out too late that you're underpaid, the Netherlands has spent real legislative effort building exactly that, and Dutch bluntness means you can usually just ask. If you're moving to Tunisia, invest early and seriously in relationships within your specific sector, because the useful salary information there doesn't live in a published band or an app — it lives in the people who already work where you want to work, and no law is coming to change that anytime soon.