Glasgow's Fight for Equal Pay



I thought I'd start off this new month with a look back on the one that just gone because October 2018 could turn out to be a momentous month in the fight for equal pay in Glasgow City Council.

At the beginning of October settlement talks with the Council had broken down - over the summer senior officials suddenly announced that the serious negotiations promised earlier in the year would be shelved and, instead, the Council would come back to the Claimants Side with a settlement offer in December 2018.

Now this was completely unacceptable - negotiations are not about one side laying down the law to its negotiating partners and the Claimants' representatives (A4ES, GMB and Unison) responded by referring all of Glasgow's equal pay cases back to the Employment Tribunal.

The trade unions (GMB and Unison) also held strike ballots in response to the understandable frustration of their members at the Council going back on its word to deliver a negotiated settlement. 

At the same time GCC spokespeople started to talk about a settlement the Council could 'afford' as opposed to one based on compensating the claimants for the pay and pensions they had lost, as a direct result of 12 years (and counting) of Glasgow's 'unfit for purpose' WPBR.

The Employment Tribunal duly met and laid down a timetable along with a 'road map' for resolving this long-running dispute via the courts - meanwhile the GMB and Unison had both returned astonishing votes of 98% and 99% in support of strike action from their members.

So a strike was duly called for 23rd and 24th October - the first of its kind in the long history of Scottish local government and far bigger, for example, than the famous Ford Dagenham strike in London which led to the 1970 Equal Pay Act.

The strike was a game changer although the Council made a enormous error by attacking the motives for the industrial action and portraying the strikers as 'mindless sheep' or 'useful idiots' who did not even understand why they were going on strike.

Glasgow's strike over equal pay had nothing to do with party politics, independence or the SNP - and no one is fooled by the efforts of 'Cybernuts' on social media who claim that supporters were bussed up from England just to attack the SNP.

Anyone who was on the March and Rally in Glasgow on 23 October knows this laughable claim to be untrue and if Glasgow's MSPs had come along, instead of boycotting the event, they would have witnessed the truth for themselves.

The good news is that intensive settlement talks are now underway and the Council seems to have abandoned its 'Here Comes Santa Claus' strategy which inspired my blog post of the same name dated 26 October 2018.

It's early days yet, but if these talks continue and turn into the serious negotiations that were promised previously, there is a fighting chance of reaching an agreement, in principle, to end Glasgow's 12-year-old equal pay dispute by the end of 2018.

Let's hope so because everyone involved now seems to agree that the Claimants have been treated shamefully for many years - what we need now is the political will to put things right.  

 

  


'Here Comes Santa Claus' (26/10/18)



Glasgow City Council has a peculiar approach to conflict resolution which is all about throwing its weight around.
  
For months equal pay settlement talks were going round and round in circles, until in August the Council announced there would be no negotiations and that senior officials would come back in December with a Council offer to end its long-running equal pay dispute.

Now this 'Hear Comes Santa Claus' strategy must have been approved in advance by the Council's chief executive, Annemarie O'Donnell, who presumably expected the Claimants to respond with generous applause, wild celebrations and general acclaim.  

But that's not how negotiations work, of course, which ought to have been obvious to any reasonable person - just as any reasonable person could also tell you that Glasgow's 37 hour 'rule' was deliberately designed to discriminate against the City Council's largely female workforce. 

So the Claimants are not going to sit back and wait on the wise old heads in the Council returning in December with settlement proposals that GCC can 'afford', as opposed to an agreement based on what the claimants are 'due' and which has been negotiated in good faith with the Claimants Representatives.


Nobody's that stupid and in just in case Annemarie O'Donnell doesn't know it already - Glaswegians don't believe in Santa Claus and Glaswegian heads don't button up the back. 


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