Focus on Glasgow (21/04/16)

I get emails on a daily basis asking me about the fight for equal pay in Glasgow City Council in which people typically raise the following points:

1. Will the City Council appeal the decision of the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT)? 
2. Will my claim be successful in the end?
3. What can the claimants do to help?

Well the honest answer is that I don't know for sure whether the Council will try and drag things out by appealing the decision.

But I am confident that the claimants will ultimately succeed because the EAT decision is very robust and so it will be extremely hard to overturn in any further appeal to the Court of Session, or beyond to the UK Supreme Court.

As for what the claimants can do to help, as I said to an A4ES client recently, this is not a spectator sport and the more people who get behind the campaign the more likely it is that the City Council will see sense and negotiate a settlement to all of its outstanding claims.

So the key thing is to ensure that equal pay becomes a big, big issue for the leadership of the Council, a real thorn in its side over the coming weeks and months, that will get only get worse and do even more damage to the Council's reputation, if the dispute rumbles on.

In other words the leadership of the City Council needs to be persuaded that they are in a dirty great hole (of their own making) and that the only realistic way forward is to 'stop digging' and put an end to this whole sorry saga.

Glasgow is becoming increasingly isolated, politically speaking; the City's constituency Labour MSPs face a wipeout at the Scottish Parliament elections on 5 May 2016, just as the Glasgow lost all of its Labour MPs at the May 2015 general election.

If you ask me, a major factor in Labour's support falling like a stone has been its head in the sand attitude over equal pay, and the same thing is also true in Labour-run North Lanarkshire and South Lanarkshire Councils.

The next round of local council elections is Scotland is scheduled for May 2017 and my view is that the current Labour administration will be swept away, if the issue of equal pay is not resolved by then.

So the more claimants in Glasgow who use the information on the blog site to raise these issues with their local councillors, MPs and MSPs, the more likely we are to achieve a final equal pay settlement this side of the 2017 council elections.

As I've said on the blog site many times before - many hands make light work - so the more people who raise the roof on social media by Liking, Sharing and Retweeting posts on Facebook and Twitter the sooner this will all be over.