Parliament and Equal Pay

I caught a bit of First Minister's Questions (FMQs) at the Scottish Parliament before the Christmas recess, the first encounter between Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister, and Kezia Dugdale, deputy leader of Scottish Labour acting as stand-in for Jim Murphy who is still a Westminster MP.

In any event the debate between the two MSPs was a unedifying affair with Kezia demanding that 'something be done' about of falling oil prices and the impact this was having on jobs in Scotland's oil industry.   

Now the price of oil goes up and down over time and, at the moment, there is a glut of oil on the world market so the cost per barrel has been dropping like a stone, just as in previous boom times the price of oil has gone through the roof.

I've known lots of oils workers down the years and they do a tough, sometimes dangerous,  job which is normally very well paid, partly because they spend so much time working away from home, but that's the nature of the industry.

I checked The Financial Times (FT) to see what's currently happening to jobs and wages in the North Sea after the oil price slump and one recent development is that the Wood Group, one of the UK's leading oil service companies, has announced a pay cut for its contractors and frozen the salaries of its British employees.

In other words, something similar to what's been happening to public sector employees in the UK over the past 5 years because of public sector pay restraint, a policy supported by the Labour Party as well as the Coalition Government, of course.  

The most recent annual survey of for North Sea workers (conducted by Hays and Oil and Gas Job Search) states that average wages were $94,200 in 2013, up from $87,100 the previous year. Before the recent oil price crash some experts were warning that skill shortages in the sector could lead to North Sea oil workers' wages increasing by 15% in 2014, taking average wage levels well beyond $100,000.

So the guys are very well paid by most people's standards and what they're experiencing at the moment is one of the industry's periodic slumps which always have and always will happen from time to time despite the apocryphal warnings from the RMT union's Jake Molloy who was reported in the FT as saying:

"This could be the tip of the iceberg. This could be the beginning of a major, major threat {to jobs}."  

The RMT's comments were referred to with approval by Kezia Dugdale in her first question to the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, but as I listened to their exchange I wondered why this senior Labour Party figure had nothing to say about a much bigger issue - the scandal of equal pay in Labour-led North Lanarkshire Council where the problems with the Council's local pay arrangements are 'man made', not the product of the ups and downs of a global oil market.

Now you can't criticise the RMT for standing up for its members, even if the union looks at what's going on from a narrow point of view, but I think you can expect politicians in the Scottish Parliament, and elsewhere to stand up for low paid public sector workers who are being let down by employers like North Lanarkshire Council.

Later on in this session of FMQs a Labour MSP from North Lanarkshire, Elaine Smith, asked the First Minister a question, the substance of which I can't recall although I do remember that it had nothing to do with equal pay or the appalling behaviour of her own Labour-led council.

 Says it all, really.