Poverty of Ambition
15 years ago, in 1999, the hourly rate of pay in Scotland for male dominated council jobs (such as refuse workers and gardeners) was around £9.00 an hour, when bonus payments were taken into account.
At the same time the typical rate of pay for jobs down by women (home carers, classroom assistants, catering, cleaning and clerical workers) was only £6.00 or so because their jobs did not attract bonus payments - even though the women worked just as hard as the men.
The 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement in Scotland was intended to tackle and close that huge pay gap and, at the time, 'equal pay' was a shared objective between the council employers (many of which were Labour controlled) and the trade unions which were all pro-Labour as well.
15 years on, Labour and its new leader Ed Miliband is boasting that the minimum wage in the UK will increase to £8.00 an hour by the end of the next Westminster Parliament (i.e. by the year 2020), if Labour wins the next general election in 2015.
So in 2020 low paid jobs (which are done mainly by women of course) will have to be earning no less than £8.00 an hour, yet the intention of the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement is that these same female dominated jobs should all have been earning at least £9.00 an hour - many years ago.
If you ask me, the biggest problem facing Ed Miliband is not the 'cost of living crisis' that he keeps banging on about, but the poverty of ambition within the Labour Party itself.
