Leftie Gobbledegook
I enjoyed this piece by David Aaronovitch in The Times in which he takes left wing political gobbledegook to task for its miserable failure to communicate simple messages clearly.
Which is kind of how I feel about Labour, left wing union leaders like Len McCluskey and equal pay.
Because why do these people bang on now about a living wage, when the same people (or their predecessors) turned a blind eye over equal pay for years - during a period when various Labour councils and Labour supporting unions held all the aces.
A Labour government was in power at Westminster with an overall majority for 13 years, a Labour-led Coalition was in power at Holyrood between 1999 and 2007, council budgets almost doubled in size in the decade up to 2007 - and there was full employment for all intents and purposes.
So just how is it that the lowest paid council workers, mainly women of course, were denied what they were promised - by these left wing 'champions' of the low paid.
Orwell would loathe this leftie gobbledegook
By David Aaronovitch
The vacuous advice recently offered to Ed Miliband is indicative of the lack of thinking at the heart of the left
Many years ago — let’s say 1946 — the thing that most socialists believed in was socialism. Socialism was not just an aesthetic but an alternative economic system to capitalism. Its partisans were convinced that rational, scientific planning for social need would take the place of the wasteful chaos of private business.
Of course the lines were blurry, and in Britain the desire to collectivise agriculture, for example, or nationalise Woolworths, was muted. But, by and large, the more of the economy that was in public ownership the better.
After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and it was clear nothing had worked, no one (except Tony Benn) believed this any more. So parties of the left were now unashamedly capitalist parties. Their missions had become to civilise capitalism on behalf of the people. This meant, among other things, a better redistribution of wealth and social goods (education, health etc). But to distribute something you have to have it first, so Labour edged its painful way to being interested in how wealth was made, not just how it was spent. The Blair-Brown years were not simply about having businesspeople say nice things about new Labour, but about how to help them to make money, employ people and pay taxes.
I chose 1946 earlier not just because it was the first full year of the first majority Labour government, but because it was also the year that George Orwell wrote the essay entitled Politics and the English Language, an utterly destructive analytical polemic against the misuse of language for political ends.
Orwell’s charge was that bad thinking and bad writing were intimately linked. “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure,” he wrote, “and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.” The same was true for language. “It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
And he went on to give some examples of the worst kind of writing, before showing how certain habits distorted or, just as often, obscured meaning. These habits would include the use of stale imagery, the replacement of concrete expressions with abstract ones, the deployment of long, technical words instead of simpler ones and the use of phrases that are “tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse”.
If there were a compassionate God then she would have wafted a copy of Orwell’s essay on to the desks of the 19 left-wing think-tanky signatories to the open letter to Ed Miliband published two weeks ago in The Guardian — because their short but influential letter was guilty of almost every sin that Orwell listed.
“Britain,” it began horribly, “faces unprecedented challenges”, which were, “a financial system still too big to fail”, austerity, climate change and a poor democratic system. To “tackle these challenges” the country needed “a transformative change in direction” and Labour in turn needed “a vision” of how to make such a change.
If it were to sell this vision, Labour required an election manifesto based on a list of principles including “prevention of the causes of our social, environmental, physical and mental health problems, which requires a holistic and long-term approach to governance”, and the “empowerment of everybody . . . to enable them to play a full role as active citizens”.
This “empowerment of everybody” would need much devolution of power, said the letter, before ending in a peroration that included the assertion that “the era of building the capacity and platforms for people to ‘do things for themselves, together’ is now upon us.”
What was upon readers of the letter was the era of incomprehension. Some well-informed analysts said that it was a kick aimed at Mr Miliband’s timidity in embracing radical policies, others that it was merely a restatement of Mr Miliband’s own radical views. They agreed that it was an important intervention, but they disagreed about what it meant.
I’ve bothered Times readers with this because I think it is significant. Labour stands a reasonable chance of forming a government in an election that will be under way about this time next year, and so it seems prudent to try to imagine what the party will want to do. And here are some of its top thinkers — or people connected with its top thinkers — arguing about exactly that.
Orwell’s point applies here. When you write this badly, when you are so unclear that even experts in your field cannot decipher your intention, there is a reason for it. It could, of course, simply be that you are an idiot. But two other explanations are more likely: either that you don’t really know what you mean yourself; or that you do know, but you’d rather not spell it out.
And here I return to update the potted left history that I started with. With no extra money to redistribute and having lost faith in the new Labour emphasis on creating wealth, there is a falling back on the idea of devolved power to somehow magically inject new vigour into everything. A sort of ginseng-for-the-limp ideology.
Tony Blair’s notion of citizen empowerment was — not unlike that of, say, Michael Gove — essentially to give the consumer, the patient, the parent, individual choices within the system. Gordon Brown’s was more about centrally improving what the consumer was given. One Nation Labour, still in the process of being formed, doesn’t want to be about either of those things.
This week Mr Miliband made a speech in Birmingham talking about how he would oversee a huge devolution of power and money to the great English cities and conurbations. Strangely a press-released figure of £20 billion over four years did not make it into the speech. Perhaps because the Labour leader might have been asked which budgets it would come from and been reminded that in any case it was less than Lord Heseltine had recommended the Tories devolve.
Yet even this, and a simultaneous announcement that there will be nine regional ministers in the next Labour government (though not in cabinet), doesn’t remotely approach the abstract ambition of the Guardian letter writers.
That’s because I think some of them are really advocating a huge boost to council powers (though that would have to mean cutting central taxation and permitting new local taxes), some of them really yearn for Venezuelan popular assemblies, and most just want a bill of fare with the word “radical” tacked to it. Because they’re on the left and that has to mean something.
I went along to a Yes Scotland meeting in Glasgow the other night and quite enjoyed my evening even though most of the audience were already in favour of Scottish independence.
But the turnout was impressive, especially on a cold and windy night, and I came away convinced of one thing - the momentum is clearly with the Yes campaign.
Lots of issues came up including equal pay and, of course, everyone supported equal pay (as they always do) although what I couldn't quite understand is why so many people are still fighting for equal pay in 2014?
Especially the original Equal Pay Act dates back to 1970 which means that employers, politicians, government (local and national) and trade unions have all known what is expected of them for well over 40 years.
If you ask me we don't need more legislation (Scottish or UK) to enforce equal pay, what we need are people who 'say what they mean and mean what they say' on these issues - instead of saying one things and then doing another.
Will things be different if Scotland becomes an independent country?
I don't know to be honest, but I find it very interesting that it was a Scottish equal pay agreement that the Scottish employers turned their backs on for years - the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement.
And it was the Scottish trade unions who stood on the sidelines doing nothing about the situation for years - without any big campaigns or threats of industrial action to get equal pay back on track.
Very few Scottish politicians (MSPs, MPs or councillors) have had much to say about the issue all this time - yet all of them, publicly at least, will say they are firm supporters of equal pay.
Yet when push came to shove the Scottish Government (in the year 2000) and Scottish council employers funded a major new pay agreement for teachers (McCrone Agreement) costing £800 million a year - while renting on a 199 Equal Pay Agreement for low paid workers which had a price tag of £400 to £500 million a year.
The Sunday Times reported the other day that if Labour wins the next year's general election, the Party will cut university tuition fees in England by at least £3,000 and as much as £5,000 a year - which will cost the public purse between £1.7 billion and £3 billion a year.
Now I think this is what Ed Miliband calls standing up for the 'squeezed middle'.
But what I'd like to know is how Labour can find all this money for middle income families - when party leaders show none of the same conviction when it comes to delivering equal pay for low council paid workers?
The vacuous advice recently offered to Ed Miliband is indicative of the lack of thinking at the heart of the left
Many years ago — let’s say 1946 — the thing that most socialists believed in was socialism. Socialism was not just an aesthetic but an alternative economic system to capitalism. Its partisans were convinced that rational, scientific planning for social need would take the place of the wasteful chaos of private business.
Of course the lines were blurry, and in Britain the desire to collectivise agriculture, for example, or nationalise Woolworths, was muted. But, by and large, the more of the economy that was in public ownership the better.
After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and it was clear nothing had worked, no one (except Tony Benn) believed this any more. So parties of the left were now unashamedly capitalist parties. Their missions had become to civilise capitalism on behalf of the people. This meant, among other things, a better redistribution of wealth and social goods (education, health etc). But to distribute something you have to have it first, so Labour edged its painful way to being interested in how wealth was made, not just how it was spent. The Blair-Brown years were not simply about having businesspeople say nice things about new Labour, but about how to help them to make money, employ people and pay taxes.
I chose 1946 earlier not just because it was the first full year of the first majority Labour government, but because it was also the year that George Orwell wrote the essay entitled Politics and the English Language, an utterly destructive analytical polemic against the misuse of language for political ends.
Orwell’s charge was that bad thinking and bad writing were intimately linked. “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure,” he wrote, “and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.” The same was true for language. “It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
And he went on to give some examples of the worst kind of writing, before showing how certain habits distorted or, just as often, obscured meaning. These habits would include the use of stale imagery, the replacement of concrete expressions with abstract ones, the deployment of long, technical words instead of simpler ones and the use of phrases that are “tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse”.
If there were a compassionate God then she would have wafted a copy of Orwell’s essay on to the desks of the 19 left-wing think-tanky signatories to the open letter to Ed Miliband published two weeks ago in The Guardian — because their short but influential letter was guilty of almost every sin that Orwell listed.
“Britain,” it began horribly, “faces unprecedented challenges”, which were, “a financial system still too big to fail”, austerity, climate change and a poor democratic system. To “tackle these challenges” the country needed “a transformative change in direction” and Labour in turn needed “a vision” of how to make such a change.
If it were to sell this vision, Labour required an election manifesto based on a list of principles including “prevention of the causes of our social, environmental, physical and mental health problems, which requires a holistic and long-term approach to governance”, and the “empowerment of everybody . . . to enable them to play a full role as active citizens”.
This “empowerment of everybody” would need much devolution of power, said the letter, before ending in a peroration that included the assertion that “the era of building the capacity and platforms for people to ‘do things for themselves, together’ is now upon us.”
What was upon readers of the letter was the era of incomprehension. Some well-informed analysts said that it was a kick aimed at Mr Miliband’s timidity in embracing radical policies, others that it was merely a restatement of Mr Miliband’s own radical views. They agreed that it was an important intervention, but they disagreed about what it meant.
I’ve bothered Times readers with this because I think it is significant. Labour stands a reasonable chance of forming a government in an election that will be under way about this time next year, and so it seems prudent to try to imagine what the party will want to do. And here are some of its top thinkers — or people connected with its top thinkers — arguing about exactly that.
Orwell’s point applies here. When you write this badly, when you are so unclear that even experts in your field cannot decipher your intention, there is a reason for it. It could, of course, simply be that you are an idiot. But two other explanations are more likely: either that you don’t really know what you mean yourself; or that you do know, but you’d rather not spell it out.
And here I return to update the potted left history that I started with. With no extra money to redistribute and having lost faith in the new Labour emphasis on creating wealth, there is a falling back on the idea of devolved power to somehow magically inject new vigour into everything. A sort of ginseng-for-the-limp ideology.
Tony Blair’s notion of citizen empowerment was — not unlike that of, say, Michael Gove — essentially to give the consumer, the patient, the parent, individual choices within the system. Gordon Brown’s was more about centrally improving what the consumer was given. One Nation Labour, still in the process of being formed, doesn’t want to be about either of those things.
This week Mr Miliband made a speech in Birmingham talking about how he would oversee a huge devolution of power and money to the great English cities and conurbations. Strangely a press-released figure of £20 billion over four years did not make it into the speech. Perhaps because the Labour leader might have been asked which budgets it would come from and been reminded that in any case it was less than Lord Heseltine had recommended the Tories devolve.
Yet even this, and a simultaneous announcement that there will be nine regional ministers in the next Labour government (though not in cabinet), doesn’t remotely approach the abstract ambition of the Guardian letter writers.
That’s because I think some of them are really advocating a huge boost to council powers (though that would have to mean cutting central taxation and permitting new local taxes), some of them really yearn for Venezuelan popular assemblies, and most just want a bill of fare with the word “radical” tacked to it. Because they’re on the left and that has to mean something.
Independence and Equal Pay
I went along to a Yes Scotland meeting in Glasgow the other night and quite enjoyed my evening even though most of the audience were already in favour of Scottish independence.
But the turnout was impressive, especially on a cold and windy night, and I came away convinced of one thing - the momentum is clearly with the Yes campaign.
Lots of issues came up including equal pay and, of course, everyone supported equal pay (as they always do) although what I couldn't quite understand is why so many people are still fighting for equal pay in 2014?
Especially the original Equal Pay Act dates back to 1970 which means that employers, politicians, government (local and national) and trade unions have all known what is expected of them for well over 40 years.
If you ask me we don't need more legislation (Scottish or UK) to enforce equal pay, what we need are people who 'say what they mean and mean what they say' on these issues - instead of saying one things and then doing another.
Will things be different if Scotland becomes an independent country?
I don't know to be honest, but I find it very interesting that it was a Scottish equal pay agreement that the Scottish employers turned their backs on for years - the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement.
And it was the Scottish trade unions who stood on the sidelines doing nothing about the situation for years - without any big campaigns or threats of industrial action to get equal pay back on track.
Very few Scottish politicians (MSPs, MPs or councillors) have had much to say about the issue all this time - yet all of them, publicly at least, will say they are firm supporters of equal pay.
Yet when push came to shove the Scottish Government (in the year 2000) and Scottish council employers funded a major new pay agreement for teachers (McCrone Agreement) costing £800 million a year - while renting on a 199 Equal Pay Agreement for low paid workers which had a price tag of £400 to £500 million a year.
Who Gets What and Why? (1 April 2014)
The Sunday Times reported the other day that if Labour wins the next year's general election, the Party will cut university tuition fees in England by at least £3,000 and as much as £5,000 a year - which will cost the public purse between £1.7 billion and £3 billion a year.
Now I think this is what Ed Miliband calls standing up for the 'squeezed middle'.
But what I'd like to know is how Labour can find all this money for middle income families - when party leaders show none of the same conviction when it comes to delivering equal pay for low council paid workers?
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.
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.
