North Lanarkshire, DIY and Equal Pay

As regular readers know, the GMB union has made a horrible mess of equal pay in North Lanarkshire where its members' claims against the Labour-run Council were restricted to only three years, unlike all the other claimant organisations.  

Yet instead of accepting responsibility for this terrible situation the GMB is trying to shift the 'blame' on to ABTU - anyone but the union.

Which means that hundreds of low paid GMB members are now lagging more than a year behind everyone else in having their equal pay claims against North Lanarkshire settled.

To add insult to injury the union is now putting the onus on its members to lead the fight for justice rather than giving this job to the local NLC union branch and the GMB's paid officials.

In a recent letter from GMB Scotland, the union says to members who have been so badly let down: 

"We are planning to get together at Airdrie Town Hall again on Friday 4th March at 7.00pm. We need to judge if a meeting would be viable, we are dependent on your input, so please indicate if you would be interested in attending. I will be asking one of our officers to attend to talk about practical support we can give to any campaign you want to launch."

In other words, the members are being expected to mount their own campaign which the GMB will support - not the other way round - which I find staggering, I have to say.

I've written about this peculiar 'DIY approach' to equal pay before and I am publishing below some posts from the blog site archive as a reminder of just how useless the Labour-supporting trade unions can be in standing up to Labour-run councils.

If you ask me, the trade unions' close political links to the Labour Party fatally compromised their ability to stand up for low paid workers during the long fight for equal pay.