Glasgow's Equal Pay Scandal

Lots of people watched the Panorama programme on equal pay last night and I think it's fair to say that the Green family did the city proud by bringing home how women workers in Scotland's largest council have been treated like 'second class' citizens for years.

Stefan Cross was also on hand to explain how Glasgow went down the same well-trodden path as other councils (e.g. North Lanarkshire and South Lanarkshire) by introducing 'new' pay arrangements which simply repackaged all the old pay differentials to ensure that traditional male jobs continued to earn much more than female workers.

In fact, Glasgow went much further than most by reorganising predominantly male and female groups of council workers into separate ALEOs in the hope that the City Council could escape its equal pay obligations.

But the Court of Session, Scotland's highest civll court, rode to the rescue by striking down Glasgow's bogus 'ALEOs are completely separate employers defence' and again in August 2017 by judging Glasgow's WPBR pay arrangements as 'unfit for purpose'.

Yet six months on the best the City Council can muster, apparently, is that the leadership has 'serious concerns' about the WPBR - instead of simply agreeing that the scheme needs to be replaced by new pay arrangements which are transparent, consistent and fair.

Here's a comment I posted on Facebook last night:

"What I don't get is why the Council leadership is so tentative about simply saying up front and out loud that the discredited WPBR pay scheme has to go! 

"If you ask me, the settlement negotiations should be focusing on new arrangements which will replace the WPBR whereas all the Council is prepared to say at this stage is that they have 'serious concerns' about the WPBR. Yet the highest civil court in Scotland condemned the scheme as 'unfit for purpose' more than 6 months ago. 

"The title of the BBC programme was 'Britain's Equal Pay Scandal' which was spot on, but the senior GCC officials who are actually responsible for this scandal still seem to be calling the shots."

Followed by a comment from Stefan Cross which I only read this morning:

"Hell I wish they’d make up their minds. In the negotiations the council officers have refused to use the word “replace”. 

"In fact they insist that it be removed from the Terms of Reference."

For some reason the City Council's political leaders are reluctant to engage directly with the claimant organisations (A4ES,  GMB and Unison) over equal pay which means that the senior officials responsible for commissioning and approving the WPBR are still making all the running.