Why are the unions so useless?
Why are the unions so useless when it comes to equal pay?
A very good question - after all it's been unlawful to discriminate on grounds of pay for almost 40 years - ever since the Equal Pay Act of 1970.
In 1998 the trade unions signed a landmark equal pay agreement with the Scottish employers - it was called the Single Status Agreement and took several years to negotiate. So, both sides went into it with their eyes wide open - they knew fine well that to achieve equal pay they had to introduce modern, non-discriminatory pay structures.
At the heart of Single Status was a commitment to sweep away the blatant discrimination against many female jobs which - everyone agreed - had been undervalued for many years.
The unions and the employers both recognised that unskilled male jobs were being paid thousands of pounds a year more than many female dominated jobs - and this was the real driving force for change.
The unions knew that their women members had a really strong case to challenge the old pay and grading system. So did the employers - and that's why Single Status came about.
Yet, the key aspect of the agreement was never implemented. Why? Because it represented (and still does) an enormous challenge inside the trade unions - a sea change no less - and also affected their sometimes all too cosy relationships with the employers.
Achieving equal pay requires a fundamental change of attitude - a culture shift - a determination to put the less well organised and less vocal groups (i.e. women workers and members) on an equal footing to everyone else.
Women are, generally speaking, less inclined to be union activists; many have no workplace (e.g. home carers) or are scattered across small workplaces and seldom meet up; they have more family commitments and less time to make their voices heard - inside trade unions that have lots of political baggage and more than a few vested interests.
The truth is that the ordinary union members (predominantly women) who stood to gain most from Single Status were effectively outmanoeuvred by a combination of union activists with their own agendas and die-hard opponents amongst the employers.
So, a complex equal pay agreement - that was the subject of painstaking consultation, that took years to negotiate and was hailed as a major breakthrough at the time - was allowed to wither away and die.
Until Action 4 Equality and Stefan Cross came along that is - now the unions and employers are hugely embarrassed at having sat about on their backsides all these years - now they're trying to do things on the cheap and not as they were originally intended.
But left to their own devices the unions (and the employers) would have done nothing at all.
A very good question - after all it's been unlawful to discriminate on grounds of pay for almost 40 years - ever since the Equal Pay Act of 1970.
In 1998 the trade unions signed a landmark equal pay agreement with the Scottish employers - it was called the Single Status Agreement and took several years to negotiate. So, both sides went into it with their eyes wide open - they knew fine well that to achieve equal pay they had to introduce modern, non-discriminatory pay structures.
At the heart of Single Status was a commitment to sweep away the blatant discrimination against many female jobs which - everyone agreed - had been undervalued for many years.
The unions and the employers both recognised that unskilled male jobs were being paid thousands of pounds a year more than many female dominated jobs - and this was the real driving force for change.
The unions knew that their women members had a really strong case to challenge the old pay and grading system. So did the employers - and that's why Single Status came about.
Yet, the key aspect of the agreement was never implemented. Why? Because it represented (and still does) an enormous challenge inside the trade unions - a sea change no less - and also affected their sometimes all too cosy relationships with the employers.
Achieving equal pay requires a fundamental change of attitude - a culture shift - a determination to put the less well organised and less vocal groups (i.e. women workers and members) on an equal footing to everyone else.
Women are, generally speaking, less inclined to be union activists; many have no workplace (e.g. home carers) or are scattered across small workplaces and seldom meet up; they have more family commitments and less time to make their voices heard - inside trade unions that have lots of political baggage and more than a few vested interests.
The truth is that the ordinary union members (predominantly women) who stood to gain most from Single Status were effectively outmanoeuvred by a combination of union activists with their own agendas and die-hard opponents amongst the employers.
So, a complex equal pay agreement - that was the subject of painstaking consultation, that took years to negotiate and was hailed as a major breakthrough at the time - was allowed to wither away and die.
Until Action 4 Equality and Stefan Cross came along that is - now the unions and employers are hugely embarrassed at having sat about on their backsides all these years - now they're trying to do things on the cheap and not as they were originally intended.
But left to their own devices the unions (and the employers) would have done nothing at all.
