Hopeless Duds
Gillian Bowditch writing in The Sunday Times was harsh in her assessment of Johann Lamont, but I think she is right to conclude that the latest Scottish Labour leader is likely to be a dud.
Now Johann became leader in the same way as Ed Miliband - with the backing of trade union votes and without the support of the majority of individual party members.
So what we are witnessing is a notch-potch of policies which make little strategic sense and have been cobbled together in a desperate attempt to recover political ground lost to the SNP in recent years.
My biggest beef with Johann is that she has been banging on about equality recently and the need for a 'living wage', yet she and her fellow Labour MPs have never raised their voices on the subject of equal pay which has been a huge scandal in Scottish local government for the past 10 years and more.
If you ask me, that speaks volumes about Johann and her Labour colleagues and so I don't expect any of them to be forming the Scottish Government anytime soon.
Johann Lamont, the deadly weapon the Yes camp has prayed for
By Gillian Bowditch - The Sunday Times
Johann Lamont likes to watch episodes of MasterChef when she is working out at the gym, part of a diet and exercise regime that has seen her lose four stone in a year. Watching lavishly prepared food while in self-denial mode is a form of masochism and, if her plans for more power for the Scottish parliament are anything to go by, this particular fetish seems to have been extended into the political realm.
At the centre of her policies for a Labour government after the referendum is an increase in taxation. While Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, was gleefully devising his “24 Tory tax rises under Osborne” riposte to last week’s budget, Lamont was telling her Scottish audience that hikes in taxation were to be welcomed.
Her “powers with a purpose” proposal was a naked and calculated return to the days of Old Labour and an appeal to die-hard trade unionists considering defecting to the SNP. It is the politics of grudge and envy. Forget devo max, this is devo tax.
If Labour wins power in 2016, an increase in income tax and council tax will be at the heart of its agenda. Lamont said MSPs would be permitted to increase but not to cut the 40p and 45p income tax rates without touching the basic rate, giving the Scottish parliament control over 40% of taxation. Council tax would be replaced with a mansion tax which would see people living in larger properties pay more. Meanwhile, the Barnett formula, which gives Scotland its preferential share of UK public spending, would stay.
There are plenty in Scotland who share Lamont’s belief that the rich should be taxed until their pips squeak. But the 40% tax rate, which a devolved Scotland under Labour’s control would have the power to raise, is paid by people earning less than £42,000. They are not the super-rich. They are production managers, IT consultants, pharmacists, teachers, college lecturers and police officers. They are Ed Miliband’s squeezed middle.
It is often claimed that increasing the 40% tax rate would kill off ambition but it destroys more than that. If you are raising a family and paying a mortgage on a salary of £42,000, a hike in your tax rate will extinguish any prospect of a decent standard of living.
Even the 50p tax rate, which Lamont seems itching to reintroduce, was depicted as a short-term necessary evil by Alistair Darling when he introduced it. Both he and Balls have claimed it is necessary as a temporary measure to help cut the deficit, though as Milton Friedman observed: “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government programme.”
It’s true that the polls indicate that those most likely to vote Yes in the referendum are in lower socio-economic groups and tend not to have mortgages — the demographic Scottish Labour has traditionally seen as its core vote. It’s also true that Labour needs to reconnect with its disillusioned grassroots and perhaps higher taxation is what they all crave.
But what is so deeply depressing about this proposal is its myopia. Labour is forever carping that the nationalists insist on applying a test of Scottishness to everything, but Labour cannot see beyond the border. This is the politics of the kailyard and fails to understand what every young entrepreneur and every go-getting citizen realises: if Scotland is to compete, it must compete globally.
Lamont’s reasoning for giving MSPs the ability to raise but not to lower income tax is that she does not want to stimulate tax competition. But any differential in income tax rates north and south of the border is bound to create tax competition. It’s just that she has ensured that Scotland will invariably be at a competitive disadvantage. Those business leaders who have warned of the potential economic instability independence would bring are unlikely to feel any more secure in a Lamont-controlled Scotland.
The UK already has an income tax system that is more progressive than most of its global competitors and it is unclear how Lamont’s plans will help Scotland compete with the world’s growth economies. She seemed to recognise this herself when she admitted last week that “all of the evidence is that economic growth is limited by higher levels of taxation, but a low-tax economy does create greater inequality”.
The thing is, we don’t have a low tax economy. If you pay 40% on a whack of your earnings, you are highly taxed and that’s before you shell out VAT, national insurance and council tax out of your post-tax income. But even if international competition matters not a jot to Scottish Labour, you might have thought it would have learnt the lessons of its own history.
Labour went into the 1992 general election with two seemingly popular policies: an increase in child benefit and a rise in state pensions. These were to be paid for by higher national insurance contributions from the better-off. When it came to the ballot box, voters worried that higher national insurance contributions represented a tax on aspiration and that the promised giveaway would damage the economy. The result was that the Conservatives, despite being politically bankrupt after 13 years in office, were re-elected with the highest vote any party has ever secured in a general election.
Tony Blair’s decision to reform the Labour party was an effort to make it palatable to voters and trusted to run the country. But the New Labour experiment largely bypassed Scotland and we’ve had zombie policies here ever since. Miliband may share Lamont’s Old Labour views but even he is likely to balk at her plans, given the anomalies with which they are riddled.
Miliband may profess to be relaxed about Lamont setting Labour policy in Scotland but if she takes the party in the opposite direction from Labour at Westminster, the division and inconsistency will be a gift to Labour’s opponents. This has been a recurring problem for Scottish Labour leaders. Henry McLeish, Jack McConnell, Wendy Alexander and Iain Gray all found themselves on collision courses with the Labour leadership in Westminster and none survived the experience.
Lamont may argue with some justification that her plans for more powers extend beyond a tax hike but she has barely managed to register in the public consciousness in her two years as leader, so there is little chance of voters absorbing the details of her plans. More than 40% of the electorate reportedly have no idea who she is. She is known only for her promise to end the freebies promulgated by the SNP and now, by her pledge to raise taxes. Neither is a vote winner.
But perhaps we don’t need to worry about this. She has just given the Yes camp its biggest boost of the campaign and in the event of a No vote, she has effectively scuttled her chances of becoming first minister. Lamont may find, come September, she has plenty of time to lick her self-inflicted wounds and watch MasterChef from the running machine.
At the centre of her policies for a Labour government after the referendum is an increase in taxation. While Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, was gleefully devising his “24 Tory tax rises under Osborne” riposte to last week’s budget, Lamont was telling her Scottish audience that hikes in taxation were to be welcomed.
Her “powers with a purpose” proposal was a naked and calculated return to the days of Old Labour and an appeal to die-hard trade unionists considering defecting to the SNP. It is the politics of grudge and envy. Forget devo max, this is devo tax.
If Labour wins power in 2016, an increase in income tax and council tax will be at the heart of its agenda. Lamont said MSPs would be permitted to increase but not to cut the 40p and 45p income tax rates without touching the basic rate, giving the Scottish parliament control over 40% of taxation. Council tax would be replaced with a mansion tax which would see people living in larger properties pay more. Meanwhile, the Barnett formula, which gives Scotland its preferential share of UK public spending, would stay.
There are plenty in Scotland who share Lamont’s belief that the rich should be taxed until their pips squeak. But the 40% tax rate, which a devolved Scotland under Labour’s control would have the power to raise, is paid by people earning less than £42,000. They are not the super-rich. They are production managers, IT consultants, pharmacists, teachers, college lecturers and police officers. They are Ed Miliband’s squeezed middle.
It is often claimed that increasing the 40% tax rate would kill off ambition but it destroys more than that. If you are raising a family and paying a mortgage on a salary of £42,000, a hike in your tax rate will extinguish any prospect of a decent standard of living.
Even the 50p tax rate, which Lamont seems itching to reintroduce, was depicted as a short-term necessary evil by Alistair Darling when he introduced it. Both he and Balls have claimed it is necessary as a temporary measure to help cut the deficit, though as Milton Friedman observed: “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government programme.”
It’s true that the polls indicate that those most likely to vote Yes in the referendum are in lower socio-economic groups and tend not to have mortgages — the demographic Scottish Labour has traditionally seen as its core vote. It’s also true that Labour needs to reconnect with its disillusioned grassroots and perhaps higher taxation is what they all crave.
But what is so deeply depressing about this proposal is its myopia. Labour is forever carping that the nationalists insist on applying a test of Scottishness to everything, but Labour cannot see beyond the border. This is the politics of the kailyard and fails to understand what every young entrepreneur and every go-getting citizen realises: if Scotland is to compete, it must compete globally.
Lamont’s reasoning for giving MSPs the ability to raise but not to lower income tax is that she does not want to stimulate tax competition. But any differential in income tax rates north and south of the border is bound to create tax competition. It’s just that she has ensured that Scotland will invariably be at a competitive disadvantage. Those business leaders who have warned of the potential economic instability independence would bring are unlikely to feel any more secure in a Lamont-controlled Scotland.
The UK already has an income tax system that is more progressive than most of its global competitors and it is unclear how Lamont’s plans will help Scotland compete with the world’s growth economies. She seemed to recognise this herself when she admitted last week that “all of the evidence is that economic growth is limited by higher levels of taxation, but a low-tax economy does create greater inequality”.
The thing is, we don’t have a low tax economy. If you pay 40% on a whack of your earnings, you are highly taxed and that’s before you shell out VAT, national insurance and council tax out of your post-tax income. But even if international competition matters not a jot to Scottish Labour, you might have thought it would have learnt the lessons of its own history.
Labour went into the 1992 general election with two seemingly popular policies: an increase in child benefit and a rise in state pensions. These were to be paid for by higher national insurance contributions from the better-off. When it came to the ballot box, voters worried that higher national insurance contributions represented a tax on aspiration and that the promised giveaway would damage the economy. The result was that the Conservatives, despite being politically bankrupt after 13 years in office, were re-elected with the highest vote any party has ever secured in a general election.
Tony Blair’s decision to reform the Labour party was an effort to make it palatable to voters and trusted to run the country. But the New Labour experiment largely bypassed Scotland and we’ve had zombie policies here ever since. Miliband may share Lamont’s Old Labour views but even he is likely to balk at her plans, given the anomalies with which they are riddled.
Miliband may profess to be relaxed about Lamont setting Labour policy in Scotland but if she takes the party in the opposite direction from Labour at Westminster, the division and inconsistency will be a gift to Labour’s opponents. This has been a recurring problem for Scottish Labour leaders. Henry McLeish, Jack McConnell, Wendy Alexander and Iain Gray all found themselves on collision courses with the Labour leadership in Westminster and none survived the experience.
Lamont may argue with some justification that her plans for more powers extend beyond a tax hike but she has barely managed to register in the public consciousness in her two years as leader, so there is little chance of voters absorbing the details of her plans. More than 40% of the electorate reportedly have no idea who she is. She is known only for her promise to end the freebies promulgated by the SNP and now, by her pledge to raise taxes. Neither is a vote winner.
But perhaps we don’t need to worry about this. She has just given the Yes camp its biggest boost of the campaign and in the event of a No vote, she has effectively scuttled her chances of becoming first minister. Lamont may find, come September, she has plenty of time to lick her self-inflicted wounds and watch MasterChef from the running machine.
Brass Neck (24 March 2014)
The business of politics requires a 'brass neck' - the ability to make claims that you know are exaggerated or even untrue, but this nonsense from the Scottish Labour leader about equality really takes the biscuit.
Because the fight for equality would have taken a huge leap forward if Labour councils in Scotland had kept their promises to deliver equal pay over the past 15 years, as required by the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement.
Now as I've explained before on the blog site the 'problem' was never about money or resources since the the Labour led Government at Holyrood and the big Labour councils managed to fund a major new pay deal for Scottish teachers (the McCrone Agreement) in the year 2000 which cost a mammoth £800 million a year.
Yet the same people and politicians turned a blind eye to the ongoing scandal in Scottish councils were traditional females jobs (carers, cooks, classroom assistants, cleaners and clerical staff) were all being paid much less than comparable male jobs.
Now funding the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement would have cost a whole lot less than the teachers pay deal, £400 to £500 million a year, but Labour councils reneged on their commitment despite the Labour led Coalition Government at Holyrood (until 2007) and the Labour Government at Westminster which had an overall majority between 1999 and 2010.
Johann Lamont was a school teacher before she stood as an MSP and she has been a full-time MSP ever since 1999, so the Labour leader must understand the underlying issues, yet I've never heard Johann say anything of significance about the long fight for equal pay in Scotland's councils, even though her seat (Glasgow Pollok) lies smack within the boundary of Glasgow City Council, the largest council in Scotland.
Shameless behaviour, if you ask me.
Labour's Johann Lamont claims SNP fails on equality
Because the fight for equality would have taken a huge leap forward if Labour councils in Scotland had kept their promises to deliver equal pay over the past 15 years, as required by the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement.
Now as I've explained before on the blog site the 'problem' was never about money or resources since the the Labour led Government at Holyrood and the big Labour councils managed to fund a major new pay deal for Scottish teachers (the McCrone Agreement) in the year 2000 which cost a mammoth £800 million a year.
Yet the same people and politicians turned a blind eye to the ongoing scandal in Scottish councils were traditional females jobs (carers, cooks, classroom assistants, cleaners and clerical staff) were all being paid much less than comparable male jobs.
Now funding the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement would have cost a whole lot less than the teachers pay deal, £400 to £500 million a year, but Labour councils reneged on their commitment despite the Labour led Coalition Government at Holyrood (until 2007) and the Labour Government at Westminster which had an overall majority between 1999 and 2010.
Johann Lamont was a school teacher before she stood as an MSP and she has been a full-time MSP ever since 1999, so the Labour leader must understand the underlying issues, yet I've never heard Johann say anything of significance about the long fight for equal pay in Scotland's councils, even though her seat (Glasgow Pollok) lies smack within the boundary of Glasgow City Council, the largest council in Scotland.
Shameless behaviour, if you ask me.
Labour's Johann Lamont claims SNP fails on equality
By Andrew Black
BBC Scotland news
Johann Lamont will criticise the Scottish government - and pledge to make high earners pay more tax
Scotland's Labour leader will compare Holyrood's SNP government to the Tories, saying it has failed to deliver equality.
Johann Lamont will tell her party's conference that, despite seven years in power, Scottish ministers had failed to distribute wealth from rich to poor.
Branding the Scottish government "Osborne Max", she will pledge to ensure the rich pay their fair share.
Ms Lamont's speech comes ahead of the Scottish independence referendum.
On 18 September, voters in Scotland will be asked the Yes/No question: "Should Scotland be an independent country?"
Ms Lamont will tell delegates in Perth: "Seven years of nationalism in Scotland - and not one policy which distributes wealth from rich to poor - in fact the opposite.
"Those in the richest houses saving most. Those with the most getting more. Those with the least getting less.
"That isn't just a betrayal of social justice - it is a betrayal of everything we believe Scotland stands for."
The Scottish Labour leader will urge members of the party faithful to "look beyond the saltire and plaid", to what she argued the SNP planned to deliver.
"While we will ask the rich to pay their fair share - the nationalists tell us that would put Scotland at a disadvantage," Ms Lamont will say.
"Social injustice is what puts Scotland at its greatest disadvantage and restoring the 50p tax rate will start to fight injustice.
"We have a nationalist government which refuses to reverse Tory tax cuts for millionaires - and a nationalist government which votes against giving workers on government contracts the living wage."
She will tell the conference: "Forget the talk of indy lite - this nationalist government is Osborne Max."
Agenda: Political will, not economics, has stalled equal pay
The Supreme Court in London ruled that the council wrong to withhold information from me. I wanted to check whether women workers at the authority were being discriminated against.
The way in which Scottish councils chose to deal with equal pay has important implications for areas of social policy.
The business goes back to 1999 when a new national agreement was struck (the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement between Scotland's council employers and the unions. The stated aim was to sweep away years of historical pay discrimination against many female- dominated jobs which were paid much less, typically £3 an hour less, than traditional male jobs.
The way equal pay was to be achieved was by raising the pay of women workers to the same as the men. The costly price tag was around £500m a year: 90,000 women workers at £3 per hour x 30 hours a week (on average) x 52 weeks = £421m.
You might well ask how Scotland's councils could afford to spend so much on equal pay. The answer is that the annual budgets of Scotland 32 councils and that of the Scottish Parliament doubled in size during the period between 1997 and 2007. So, money was never the problem – the problem was political will.
Because in the year 2000 Scotland's 32 local councils with the enthusiastic support of the Scottish Government, implemented a much more expensive agreement on teachers' pay, the McCrone Agreement, with a far weightier annual price tag of £800m. Now this pay deal gave Scottish teachers an unprecedented 23.5% increase in a single year, whereas other very low- paid council workers were still waiting for the promises of their 1999 Equal Pay Agreement to be honoured.
Nowadays Labour and the unions are demanding a so-called Living Wage, yet I am struck by the thought that a rate of £9 an hour could and should have been achieved years ago. Not only would this have put more money into the pockets and purses of thousands of low-paid women council workers, but equal pay would also have eliminated the need for the crazy and complex system of working tax credits.
Those who failed to keep their promises in 1999 were the Labour councils who dominated the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (Cosla) at the time and the Labour trade unions who decided not to cut up rough on behalf of their lowest-paid members. Instead this was done by Action 4 Equality Scotland (A4ES), which arrived on the scene in 2005 and began to explain the big pay differences between male and female council jobs, which led to an explosion of equal pay claims in the Employment Tribunals.
Aome people criticise A4ES because we charge clients a success fee of 10% (not 25% as some have suggested), but I've always regarded that as great value for money. The same people wrongly claim that the unions represented their members "for nothing", which is nonsense because they were, of course, taking millions of pounds in union contributions from these members –while turning a blind eye what was going on right under their noses.
So the fight for equal pay continues because certain councils decided to preserve the historically higher pay of traditional male workers when introducing job evaluation, which means that women workers have a potential ongoing claim while these pay differences continue.
Other councils have cynically reduced male workers' pay to avoid the likelihood of claims from women employees, yet this was never the aim of the original Equal Pay Agreement: the problem was never that men were paid too much, but that women were paid too little.
Mark Irvine was chief union negotiator in the 1999 Scottish agreement which was meant to deliver equal pay for women.
Scotland and Equal Pay (24 January 2014)
Here's another post about the politics of equal pay which I've decided to re-publish in light of the speech by Labour's Margaret Curran on Women and Independence.
But the employers and the unions failed to keep their promises which is why so many of these cases ended up in the Employment Tribunals - as union members voted with their feet and decided to pursue their equal pay claims with A4ES.
For example, Ruth's comment that "The unions, however dozy, went into bat for nothing" is plainly wrong - because the unions charged their low paid women members millions of pounds in contributions (membership fees) over this period - yet let them down miserably when it came to sweeping away years of pay discrimination.
I was genuinely taken aback to such an ill-informed and unbalanced piece, so I decided to write to Ruth Wishart recently and invite her to meet with Mark Irvine and Carol Fox - to set the record straight.
Sad to say that offer wasn't taken up, but there is still an open invitation for any journalist who - like Ruth - appears to be struggling to grasp the basic rights and wrongs of equal pay.
No easy answers in the struggle for equal pay
Scotland's Labour leader will compare Holyrood's SNP government to the Tories, saying it has failed to deliver equality.
Johann Lamont will tell her party's conference that, despite seven years in power, Scottish ministers had failed to distribute wealth from rich to poor.
Branding the Scottish government "Osborne Max", she will pledge to ensure the rich pay their fair share.
Ms Lamont's speech comes ahead of the Scottish independence referendum.
On 18 September, voters in Scotland will be asked the Yes/No question: "Should Scotland be an independent country?"
Ms Lamont will tell delegates in Perth: "Seven years of nationalism in Scotland - and not one policy which distributes wealth from rich to poor - in fact the opposite.
"Those in the richest houses saving most. Those with the most getting more. Those with the least getting less.
"That isn't just a betrayal of social justice - it is a betrayal of everything we believe Scotland stands for."
The Scottish Labour leader will urge members of the party faithful to "look beyond the saltire and plaid", to what she argued the SNP planned to deliver.
"While we will ask the rich to pay their fair share - the nationalists tell us that would put Scotland at a disadvantage," Ms Lamont will say.
"Social injustice is what puts Scotland at its greatest disadvantage and restoring the 50p tax rate will start to fight injustice.
"We have a nationalist government which refuses to reverse Tory tax cuts for millionaires - and a nationalist government which votes against giving workers on government contracts the living wage."
She will tell the conference: "Forget the talk of indy lite - this nationalist government is Osborne Max."
Politics of Equal Pay (2 August 2013)
I am often drawing readers' attention to interesting and/or thought provoking article in the newspapers and here's a real doozy which lays bare the politics of Equal Pay in today's Herald - from none other than little old me!
So, go out and buy yourself a copy of the Herald, share it with your friends and use the information in the article to good effect - kick up a great fuss - for example, by posing a few awkward questions to your local councillor, MSP or MP.
Because when it comes to equal pay - Scotland's politicians, particularly its Labour politicians, have a great deal to answer for, if you ask me.
There are still battles being fought on equal pay.
The Supreme Court in London ruled that the council wrong to withhold information from me. I wanted to check whether women workers at the authority were being discriminated against.
The way in which Scottish councils chose to deal with equal pay has important implications for areas of social policy.
The business goes back to 1999 when a new national agreement was struck (the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement between Scotland's council employers and the unions. The stated aim was to sweep away years of historical pay discrimination against many female- dominated jobs which were paid much less, typically £3 an hour less, than traditional male jobs.
The way equal pay was to be achieved was by raising the pay of women workers to the same as the men. The costly price tag was around £500m a year: 90,000 women workers at £3 per hour x 30 hours a week (on average) x 52 weeks = £421m.
You might well ask how Scotland's councils could afford to spend so much on equal pay. The answer is that the annual budgets of Scotland 32 councils and that of the Scottish Parliament doubled in size during the period between 1997 and 2007. So, money was never the problem – the problem was political will.
Because in the year 2000 Scotland's 32 local councils with the enthusiastic support of the Scottish Government, implemented a much more expensive agreement on teachers' pay, the McCrone Agreement, with a far weightier annual price tag of £800m. Now this pay deal gave Scottish teachers an unprecedented 23.5% increase in a single year, whereas other very low- paid council workers were still waiting for the promises of their 1999 Equal Pay Agreement to be honoured.
Nowadays Labour and the unions are demanding a so-called Living Wage, yet I am struck by the thought that a rate of £9 an hour could and should have been achieved years ago. Not only would this have put more money into the pockets and purses of thousands of low-paid women council workers, but equal pay would also have eliminated the need for the crazy and complex system of working tax credits.
Those who failed to keep their promises in 1999 were the Labour councils who dominated the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (Cosla) at the time and the Labour trade unions who decided not to cut up rough on behalf of their lowest-paid members. Instead this was done by Action 4 Equality Scotland (A4ES), which arrived on the scene in 2005 and began to explain the big pay differences between male and female council jobs, which led to an explosion of equal pay claims in the Employment Tribunals.
Aome people criticise A4ES because we charge clients a success fee of 10% (not 25% as some have suggested), but I've always regarded that as great value for money. The same people wrongly claim that the unions represented their members "for nothing", which is nonsense because they were, of course, taking millions of pounds in union contributions from these members –while turning a blind eye what was going on right under their noses.
So the fight for equal pay continues because certain councils decided to preserve the historically higher pay of traditional male workers when introducing job evaluation, which means that women workers have a potential ongoing claim while these pay differences continue.
Other councils have cynically reduced male workers' pay to avoid the likelihood of claims from women employees, yet this was never the aim of the original Equal Pay Agreement: the problem was never that men were paid too much, but that women were paid too little.
Mark Irvine was chief union negotiator in the 1999 Scottish agreement which was meant to deliver equal pay for women.
Scotland and Equal Pay (24 January 2014)
If you ask me, Margaret Curran's comments are ill-informed and ludicrous because the main reason that the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement was not implemented properly - was down to the role of the big Labour councils which controlled CoSLA at the time and the failure of the Labour supporting trade unions to stand up for the interests of low paid women workers.
Money was never the stumbling block because the Labour-led Scottish Government along with CoSLA (the umbrella body for local councils) managed to find £800 million to fund the McCrone pay deal which in the year 2000 handed an eye-watering 23.5% pay increase to another group of council employees - Scottish school teachers.
Now this £800 million was built into the Scottish Government's base budget which means that it costs the country and extra £800 million every year to pay teachers a good salary - at the level determined by the historic McCrone Agreement.
But the McCrone Agreement somehow leapfrogged and took precedence over the cost of implementing the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement which, at the time, was estimated to be £400 to £500 million a year.
Interestingly, the Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement would have benefited well over 90,000 very low paid council workers, most of them women, while the McCrone Agreement gave an unprecedented pay increase to a smaller group of around 70,000 teachers.
So, why was the money found for teachers and not other employees much further down the pay ladder?
I don't know, but the answer to that question lies with the Scottish Government, the council employers and the trade unions - all three organisations being dominated by the political priorities of Labour Party.
Politics of Equal Pay (20 August 2013)
I came across this article on equal pay which I missed for some reason - when it was published in The Herald back in January 2013.
Now the writer involved - Ruth Wishart - is an experienced journalist, so I was both surprised and disappointed that the piece contained so many inaccuracies and mistakes.
For a start to use the words 'pay anomalies' to describe what was going in Glasgow back in 2005 is an abuse of the English language - as if there were just a few wrinkles here and there.
Because what was taking place in Glasgow (and elsewhere) - right under the noses of the trade unions and seasoned journalists like Ruth Wishart - was widespread pay discrimination against thousands of low paid women.
Women in caring, catering, cleaning clerical and classroom assistant jobs - who were routinely being paid thousands of pounds a year less than relatively unskilled male jobs such as refuse workers or gardeners.
When Action 4 Equality Scotland (A4ES) arrived on the scene in 2005, things began to change because we explained to women workers exactly what was going on - and the fact that council employers and trade unions in Scotland had promised to sweep away this widespread pay discrimination as far back as 1999.
And this was during a 10 year period between 1997 and 2007 - when the budgets of councils in Scotland actually doubled in size, of course.
But the employers and the unions failed to keep their promises which is why so many of these cases ended up in the Employment Tribunals - as union members voted with their feet and decided to pursue their equal pay claims with A4ES.
So much so that A4ES clients outnumber the trade union backed cases by a ratio of 10 to 1 - not 4 to 1 as Ruth Wishart wrongly suggests - and A4ES charges a its clients a success fee of 10% which Ruth would also know if she had bothered to check her facts.
Another glaring error is Ruth's reference to a Scottish Joint Council Job Evaluation scheme which she says was still under negotiation - but the truth is that a nationally approved Job Evaluation scheme specifically developed for Scottish councils had been available for use since 1999 - and this scheme was supported by the trade unions.
So Glasgow's decision to use a different scheme had nothing to do with choosing a quicker option - quite the opposite in fact.
I find this all the more amazing because Ruth is (or was until recently ) a member of the Leveson Expert Group - whose advice on how to implement the Leveson Report in Scotland was quickly binned by the Scottish Government.
Yet the original Leveson Report was concerned with journalistic standards in the press and media - such as the importance of behaving with integrity and getting your facts right even when writing an opinion piece.
For example, Ruth's comment that "The unions, however dozy, went into bat for nothing" is plainly wrong - because the unions charged their low paid women members millions of pounds in contributions (membership fees) over this period - yet let them down miserably when it came to sweeping away years of pay discrimination.
I was genuinely taken aback to such an ill-informed and unbalanced piece, so I decided to write to Ruth Wishart recently and invite her to meet with Mark Irvine and Carol Fox - to set the record straight.
Sad to say that offer wasn't taken up, but there is still an open invitation for any journalist who - like Ruth - appears to be struggling to grasp the basic rights and wrongs of equal pay.
By Ruth Wishart (22 January 2013)
On one level it sounds so simple.
People should get the same pay for work of similar value regardless of gender. The Treaty of Rome said so way back in 1957. The UK law enshrined it when the Equal Pay Act came fully into force in 1975. What could go wrong?
Pretty well every thing as it happens. From dodgy employers in the early days who thought it smart practice to promote every single bloke on the payroll, to mass re-writing of job descriptions, to assembly lines being re-jigged to make them single sex.
And even when the rogues were rounded up, the earnings gap stubbornly persisted. Still does. But now all these years of underpayment have come back to bite cash-strapped local authorities who, not exactly obstructed by male-dominated unions, continued to preside over arrangements which turned out to be institutionally discriminatory.
A landmark judgment at the end of last year found Birmingham City Council on the wrong end of a court case brought by more than 170 women claiming back pay over six years. It is likely to open the floodgates for hundreds, if not thousands more.
Meanwhile, next month sees Glasgow City Council at a second session of an employment tribunal – there's a third scheduled for May – defending the arrangements it has come to after a process which began way back in 2005. A process which has already cost it over £50 million in compensation packages to female employees.
But this is not a straightforward tale of winners and losers, nor for that matter heroes and villains. When Glasgow City Council did its job evaluation exercise seven years ago there was no shortage of pay anomalies tumbling out of the woodwork.
As was the case with other councils, pay rates had grown up which made the casual assumption that outdoor dirty jobs like refuse collection and grave digging were intrinsically worth more than indoor manual work like cooking and cleaning. No prizes for guessing which of these categories employed more men than women and vice versa.
On top of that was an extraordinary bonus culture which widened the pay gap quite dramatically. As one executive explained "it seems that in some areas bonuses were being paid for turning up to work". And a lack of transparency around who got paid what and why meant that many of the disadvantaged women had no notion just how poorly paid they were by comparison with similar or poorer male skill levels.
The workforce pay and benefit review was designed to examine and eradicate these anomalies. Glasgow decided not to use the Scottish Joint Council Scheme still under negotiation, but used the Greater London Provincial Model on the grounds it would be a faster option than re-inventing the wheel. This entailed putting diverse jobs into 13 "job families" depending on the working context and skills.
The exercise meant higher pay for almost 25,000 employees, but loss of earnings for just under 4000. Under the deal anyone losing more than £500 would be offered skills development and there would be pay protection for three years.
The unions had several complaints about this, suggesting – among other complaints – that employees having to sign on the dotted line before being compensated for previous inequities was a form of blackmail.
But their cages were also being rattled by a new breed of specialist lawyers who saw the fight for equal pay as a lucrative niche market.
Their pitch was that on a no-win-no-fee basis they could get the women a better deal than union reps who, they suggested, had been asleep on the job in order to protect the incomes of their male membership.
Since the lawyers' cut of a successful action involved anything from 10% to 25% of the women's compensation packages, it seems somewhat disingenuous to suppose the main motive was a lofty crusade against injustice and discrimination. The unions, however dozy, went into bat for nothing.
In the event, four times as many Glasgow employees plumped for a private law firm than for Unison, though not the least of the ironies in this saga is that many of the lawyers involved had previously worked for Unison.
But, as I said, this is not a simple tale. Righting previous wrongs is important. Equal pay for work of equal value is essential. Yet all of this unfolds against a backdrop of budget cuts inevitably resulting in job losses.
It's not so much being careful what we wish for, more a dispiriting calculation on benefits versus costs.
