North Lanarkshire Update

Here's an article written by Alex Neil MSP for the Airdrie and Coatbridge Advertiser, one of the local newspapers in North Lanarkshire. 

I hope that people still fighting for equal pay in this Labour-run Council will follow the article up by writing to the paper with their own thoughts.


Article for the Airdrie and Coatbridge Advertiser from Alex Neil MSP for Airdrie and Shotts

The Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970. It was meant to ensure that men and women would be paid the same wages for the same work. Yet, 45 years after the Act was passed, Labour-run North Lanarkshire Council has still not implemented it. The Council has wasted hundreds of thousands of pounds fighting the rights of its employees to get equal pay. It has had to be brought kicking and screaming into submission, to agree to implement the Equal Pay Act in principle.

However it is still using every delaying tactic it can to implement equal pay despite thousands of individual claimants already having had to wait years to get what they are entitled to in law.

The total cost of this incompetence by the Council will run into many tens of millions of pounds. These are the sums that will eventually have to be paid out to those who are each owed thousands of pounds in back pay by North Lanarkshire Council.

But it’s not only the Council which has badly let down its workers. Some of the trade unions have been found badly wanting on this matter too. This may be because too many of the unions are still run by men and most of the claimants are women. In too many cases members have put their faith in their union to fight the battle for equal pay, both collectively and for individuals and too often the union leaderships have badly let them down.

That is why Neil Gray MP and I are taking up the cudgels on behalf of those workers who have been cheated out of their equal pay up until now. We held a special meeting earlier this week for people with outstanding claims so they could hear from specialists in the law of equal pay. They spelt out how those who have still to receive an offer can go about advancing their claim and hopefully getting it settled, soon.

I abhor what the Tory Government is doing to emasculate the trade union movement. But there is no excuse for those union leaderships which have so badly let down their members on the subject of equal pay; just as there is no excuse for Labour Councillors to try to deny the rights of their employees to get equal pay to which they are entitled.