War of Words

A kind reader sent me the following exchange of views between two councillors in South Lanarkshire Council - which appeared in the local press.

Now I am firmly on the side of the of the 3,000 plus low paid workers who are pursuing equal pay claims against South Lanarkshire Council, I know - but having declared that interest it still seems clear to me that the Labour Group spokesperson is talking nonsense.

Because it's quite correct to say that the Council's so-called 'Living Wage' has nothing whatsoever to do with the thousands of outstanding equal pay claims - which are still before the Employment Tribunals.

And it can be argued, quite persuasively, that if the Council had implemented the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement  properly - then there would be absolutely no need for a 'living wage' in 2013.

The reason being that the predominantly female jobs (carers, cleaners, cooks, clerical workers and classroom assistants) which stood to benefit most from the 1999 Single Status Agreement - would have caught up (in pay terms) with their male council colleagues many years ago.

In other words these low paid workers would have been earning £7.56 an hour - or even more - long before now.

So, the Living Wage is really just a fig leaf - a belated and botched attempt to cover up  the Council's embarrassment for failing to implement Equal Pay on fair and proper terms - which was the real purpose of the 1999 Agreement.

Put plainly, £7.56 an hour in 2013 in no way compensates all the low paid workers for what they lost out on over the years and which - for some of them - will amount to thousands of pounds for every single year.

To my mind, any reasonable person would agree that Labour-run South Lanarkshire Council has made a complete mess of equal pay - and its decision to fight this FOI request all the way to the UK Supreme Court is just the latest in a very long line of expensive mistakes.

What it comes down to is that if South Lanarkshire Council had nothing to hide - it would simply publish the pay information ordered by the Scottish Information Commissioner and three senior judges in the Court of Session, Scotland's highest civil court. 

If you ask me, the whole business is a public disgrace.

"Council war of words erupts"

Dear Editor

I'm sure your readers were quick to see last week's letter(May9) in the Hamilton Advertiser by Cllr Peter Craig for what it was; cheap political points scoring dressed up to look like concern for the low paid workers.

For the record, I and the wider Labour Group are proud to remind him that South Lanarkshire Council is at the forefront when it comes to taking care of the low paid. That is why our Council has set its Living Wage at £7.56 an hour, the highest rate outside London.

As to the issue of equal pay, if Cllr Craig and his SNP colleagues had been paying attention they would understand that it is specifically to protect the rights of our current and former workers that the council is challenging a Freedom of information request made by a third party.

The motive behind this correspondence is clearly motivated by a member of a rebel SNP grouping who tried and spectacularly failed to take over the Leadership positions of the opposition at the party's recent AGM. The time has now come for Cllr Craig to accept that he lost that bitter nationalist v nationalist contest, and get on with the serious business of representing the people of South Lanarkshire.

Cllr John McNamee

Assistant Business Manager of the Labour Group
South Lanarkshire Council


"FOI refusal wrong and destructive. Councillors' war of words goes on"

Dear Sir(s)

I would like to thank Cllr McNamee for his reply to my letter.(May 9th) I was beginning to think that the South Lanarkshire Labour Party had learnt from the old adage, that when you are in a hole the best policy is to stop digging, but as we can all see from his reply, they were just taking time to sharpen the shovels.

The fact that the Council has set its living wage at £7.56 an hour is positive and something that I and the whole SNP group support, and voted for, but that is not what the equal pay claims are about.

Let me start with John's jibe of cheap political point scoring. Only a Labour Councillor could consider spending up to a million pounds of taxpayers' money on expensive lawyers who have lost case after case in an effort to keep information out of the hands of the low paid workers, is cheap. I can assure him in these days of austerity and cuts to important services it is anything but cheap.

He states that the reason for continuing to oppose the Freedom of Information request is to protect current and former workers. This is not supported by their appeal to the Information Commissioner, or their further appeal to the three Court of Session Judges Lords Marnoch, Brailsford and Mackay of Drumadoon, who unanimously instructed South Lanarkshire to hand over the information.

This is about discrimination and how we treat our workers, it started because woman workers in South Lanarkshire felt they were not being treated fairly in comparison to the men, and has now widened to discrimination of both sexes. All they asked was that the Council treated their claim with openness and transparency, but have seen nothing but obstinacy and secrecy, from this Labour administration.

Every member of the SNP group now call on Cllr McNamee and all his Labour colleagues to desist in their bid to take their appeal even further to the Supreme Court in London and give the workers a chance to see if their complaints are genuine or not.


Cllr Peter Craig

Ward 20 Larkhall
South Lanarkshire Council