Empty Promises and Equal Pay
You Scotland recently published the following article on equal pay - it can also be read on-line at their interactive and informative web site: www.youscotland.com
Hands up, who supports equal pay? Everyone does, don't they,because Scotland has come a long way since women worked just for 'pin money'.
But, if this is true, why are so many women workers still paid so much less than their male colleagues? Especially when women have had the law on their side - the 1970 Equal Pay Act - for almost 40 years!
The answer is that employers and trade unions have turned a blind eye to widespread pay discrimination for years. This explains why council carers - with highly demanding and responsible jobs - earn less then relatively unskilled male jobs, such as refuse workers and road sweepers.
Whatever they say about an unshakeable commitment to equality, the big public sector employers have been quietly defending the indefensible for years - and the trade unions have been prepared to look the other way.
In 1999, Scotland's local councils and trade unions signed an historic equal pay agreement. The proposed new system was intended to pay all workers fairly - regardless of gender, on the basis of real skills and responsibilities - recognising that old, outdated employer/union agreements undervalued and underpaid many predominantly female jobs.
A new approach required non-discriminatory schemes - that assessed and scored jobs relative to one another - to produce a fair and logical set of grades and rates of pay - across the entire workforce.
But what actually happened was nothing - for six long years. Then Action 4 Equality and Stefan Cross came along and let the cat out of the bag - by highlighting the big pay differences between male and female jobs and by explaining how to fight back.
Overnight thousands of women workers started submitting equal pay claims - using the courts to get redress.
Collective bargaining had betrayed the very people it was supposed to serve. Predictably, the employers blamed the trade unions and the unions blamed the employers - even though both sides knew exactly what they were signing up to at the time.
Worse followed. Instead of being honest and acting with integrity, the unions collaborated with the employers to keep their women members in the dark - and simply ignored the huge and ongoing pay gap with the men. This duplicity has led to thousands of low paid women members suing their own trade unions for the lack of proper legal advice and professional support.
Pay discrimination is also rife in Scotland's NHS. Again the employers and trade unions came up with a similar solution - Agenda for Change - a new grading system which has been sold as dealing with equal pay, but is nothing of the sort.Instead, Agenda for Change is a mechanism for protecting men's pay and avoiding equal pay claims.
NHS pay structures are completely crazy. The equal pay gap has been widely known to employers and since 1997 at least - when large scale claims were first made in Cumbria.
Cumbria's claims established that nursing assistants did jobs of equal value to male maintenance workers, but the men were being paid £4,000 a year more than the largely female nurses.
Likewise, fully trained and highly qualified nurses earned less than male electronics technicians - and medical secretaries less than joiners and painters. Even senior nurses - with years of specialist training - were being paid less than junior maintenance managers.
So, the people looking after property were being paid more than those caring for patients!
Recent events have shown the unions up in their true colours. Unions like to portray themselves as champions of equal pay, but collective bargaining has let women workers down - big time.
The difference is that people now have a choice - they don't need to stay trapped inside the world of employer/union agreements - a kind of industrial relations 'black hole'. That's why so many are now prepared to hold the unions to account - and consider other solutions to their problems.
Scotland's unions have lost the plot on equal pay. Women workers have been betrayed by a tribal male culture, driven by windy rhetoric, wedded to one political party, compromised and ultimately paralysed by its own vested interests.
Mark Irvine
April 2007
Hands up, who supports equal pay? Everyone does, don't they,because Scotland has come a long way since women worked just for 'pin money'.
But, if this is true, why are so many women workers still paid so much less than their male colleagues? Especially when women have had the law on their side - the 1970 Equal Pay Act - for almost 40 years!
The answer is that employers and trade unions have turned a blind eye to widespread pay discrimination for years. This explains why council carers - with highly demanding and responsible jobs - earn less then relatively unskilled male jobs, such as refuse workers and road sweepers.
Whatever they say about an unshakeable commitment to equality, the big public sector employers have been quietly defending the indefensible for years - and the trade unions have been prepared to look the other way.
In 1999, Scotland's local councils and trade unions signed an historic equal pay agreement. The proposed new system was intended to pay all workers fairly - regardless of gender, on the basis of real skills and responsibilities - recognising that old, outdated employer/union agreements undervalued and underpaid many predominantly female jobs.
A new approach required non-discriminatory schemes - that assessed and scored jobs relative to one another - to produce a fair and logical set of grades and rates of pay - across the entire workforce.
But what actually happened was nothing - for six long years. Then Action 4 Equality and Stefan Cross came along and let the cat out of the bag - by highlighting the big pay differences between male and female jobs and by explaining how to fight back.
Overnight thousands of women workers started submitting equal pay claims - using the courts to get redress.
Collective bargaining had betrayed the very people it was supposed to serve. Predictably, the employers blamed the trade unions and the unions blamed the employers - even though both sides knew exactly what they were signing up to at the time.
Worse followed. Instead of being honest and acting with integrity, the unions collaborated with the employers to keep their women members in the dark - and simply ignored the huge and ongoing pay gap with the men. This duplicity has led to thousands of low paid women members suing their own trade unions for the lack of proper legal advice and professional support.
Pay discrimination is also rife in Scotland's NHS. Again the employers and trade unions came up with a similar solution - Agenda for Change - a new grading system which has been sold as dealing with equal pay, but is nothing of the sort.Instead, Agenda for Change is a mechanism for protecting men's pay and avoiding equal pay claims.
NHS pay structures are completely crazy. The equal pay gap has been widely known to employers and since 1997 at least - when large scale claims were first made in Cumbria.
Cumbria's claims established that nursing assistants did jobs of equal value to male maintenance workers, but the men were being paid £4,000 a year more than the largely female nurses.
Likewise, fully trained and highly qualified nurses earned less than male electronics technicians - and medical secretaries less than joiners and painters. Even senior nurses - with years of specialist training - were being paid less than junior maintenance managers.
So, the people looking after property were being paid more than those caring for patients!
Recent events have shown the unions up in their true colours. Unions like to portray themselves as champions of equal pay, but collective bargaining has let women workers down - big time.
The difference is that people now have a choice - they don't need to stay trapped inside the world of employer/union agreements - a kind of industrial relations 'black hole'. That's why so many are now prepared to hold the unions to account - and consider other solutions to their problems.
Scotland's unions have lost the plot on equal pay. Women workers have been betrayed by a tribal male culture, driven by windy rhetoric, wedded to one political party, compromised and ultimately paralysed by its own vested interests.
Mark Irvine
April 2007
