Who Can You Trust?

I've been contacted by a number of readers from South Lanarkshire who are looking for advice on how best to pursue an equal pay claim.

Now normally I would simply encourage people to sign up with Action 4 Equality Scotland, but we are no longer taking on new clients in South Lanarkshire because the Council has agreed to settle all of our outstanding equal pay cases.

And since that news has broken, a couple of local law firms have apparently stepped into the void left by A4ES and the trade unions have burst into life as well by developing a new found interest in equal pay, which they ignored for years of course.

So the question that people are asking me, i.e. people who failed to take up a claim with A4ES, is whether they should go with one of these law firms or their trade union.

In some ways that's an impossible question to answer because I don't have enough information to hand on what the different parties are saying.

But what I would say is that if I were in that position it would come down to which party I felt I could trust - who would give me the best service and advice.

The problem for the trade unions in South Lanarkshire is that they have been telling their members for years not to pursue equal pay claims, so it seem a bit rich now for the unions to be promoting the message 'your claim is safe in our hands'.

In which case I would weigh things up carefully and ask some hard headed questions before deciding which way to jump.