Glasgow's Fight for Equal Pay

I noticed a post on the equal pay Facebook page the other day which highlighted the huge sums Glasgow City Council spent in defending its indefensible WPBR pay scheme for many years.

Now if I remember correctly the post was from a Rosie Kane who well might be the same Rosie Kane who was previously an MSP in the Scottish Parliament.

In any event, this is an old story and here's a post from the blog site archive from October 2017 which puts the whole business into proper perspective. 

I also posted a comment on Facebook to say that politicians are always free with their pledges and promises, but if you ask me it makes sense to take what they all have to say with a big pinch of salt.

Yes, I think it's wise to take what all politicians say with a big pinch of salt - Labour were knocked off their perch in Glasgow at the 2017 local elections and rightly so, but the SNP led council went on to submit an appeal to the Court of Session in December 2017 in an effort to overturn the court's earlier decision that Glasgow's WPBR pay scheme was 'unfit for purpose'.

Putting politicians on pedestals or hero worshipping party leaders is never a good idea, in my experience.

  

The Fight for Equal Pay in Glasgow (01/10/19)

The Sunday Herald has a must read article by Peter Swindon on the costs racked up by Glasgow City Council in the long fight for equal pay.

The SNP have repeatedly said that they are committed to a comprehensive settlement of the outstanding claims and that people will receive the compensation they are so obviously entitled to given the damning judgment from the Court of Session.

But the City Council has still to come clean and explain the details of exactly how the men's interests were looked after under the WPBR pay scheme which is fundamental to any settlement, since the pay gap between traditional male and female jobs still exists in 2017 and is just as wide as it was ten years ago in 2007.  

I had to laugh though at the 'no comment' comment from Richard Leonard who worked for the GMB union for many years before becoming an MSP: one minute he he's a champion of equal pay, yet the next he can't find anything to say about the appalling track record of Labour and the unions in Glasgow.

  

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/15568711.Revealed__Labour_led_Glasgow_council_spent_millions_fighting_women_workers__39__equal_pay_claims/

Revealed: Labour-led Glasgow council spent millions fighting women workers' equal pay claims

By Peter Swindon - The Sunday Herald


Susan Aitken

SCOTLAND’S largest local authority spent more than £2.5 million fighting equal pay claims by female council workers over the last 10 years.

Figures released following a Freedom of Information request show that between 2007 and 2017 – when the Labour Party controlled Glasgow City Council – £1.8m was spent on legal fees and a further £700,000 on “internal staff costs” to contest claims by women who were victims of wage discrimination.

The SNP claimed the figures “demonstrate just how far Labour was prepared to go to fight equal pay” and a campaign group which represents the majority of claimants said the outlay was an “incredible waste of public money”.

The Court of Session decided in August that a re-grading scheme introduced by Glasgow City Council in 2007 may have provided less favourable treatment for women workers. In September the SNP leader of the local authority Susan Aitken pledged to “end Glasgow’s years of pay injustice”.

She has held meetings with Scottish Government Finance Secretary Derek Mackay to discuss “financial assistance” which could help pay the anticipated £500m compensation bill to at least 6,000 women.

However, the SNP has criticised Labour for dragging its heels on equal pay when it led the council, potentially increasing the cost to the public purse.

The Freedom of Information request asked Glasgow City Council to set out internal and external costs for equal pay litigation and administration and the local authority provided figures from 2007 until 2017, a period covered by the re-grading scheme which was at the centre of the Court of Session ruling.

The council spent a total of £2,551,256 fighting the claims, including £712,832 on internal staff costs. The fees for “counsels, solicitors, opposition legal expenses, shorthand writers, postage” and “other professional fees and expenses” totalled £1,838,425.

A council source said one long-serving senior director “went white” when they realised how much had been paid out.

Last month Aitken, who became council leader after the May local authority election, accused Labour politicians of “sticking their heads in the sand” over equal pay, “denying justice” to women workers.

She said years of inaction “inflated the potential cost with each passing year – not to mention the cost of legal fees”.

An SNP source said: “These figures are horrendous and show just how far Labour was prepared to go in Glasgow to fight equal pay. If they had just sorted this out when it first became an issue 10 years ago it would have cost a fraction of what it will cost now.

“Labour's leadership candidates need to justify why they stayed silent on this issue for all those years and didn't raise it with Labour whilst they ran the council. Why didn't they ask them to direct officers to resolve this issue years ago?”

Former Head of Local Government for Unison Scotland, Mark Irvine, who is now an equalities campaigner and the spokesman for Action 4 Equality Scotland (A4ES), which represents more than 80 per cent of claimants, said: “£2.5 m is an incredible waste of public money, especially after three senior judges in Scotland's highest civil court, the Court of Session, unanimously concluded that Glasgow City Council's pay arrangements are unfit for purpose.

“I suspect the figure is likely to be a huge underestimate of the true cost to the council and local council taxpayers…Glasgow's figures underestimate the real costs involved because they don't reflect the cost of large numbers of highly paid senior officials spending much time of their time pulling the wool over the eyes of a largely female workforce, instead of looking after their interests by upholding the principle of equal pay for work of equal value.”

A council spokeswoman said: “These are costs incurred by previous administrations that chose to challenge pay claims through the courts.”

A Labour source accused SNP critics of “staggering hypocrisy” adding “It is currently an SNP-run council which is appealing a Court of Session decision on equal pay.”

Aitken responded: “Any remaining legal proceedings will only be for the purposes of providing clarity, they will not be used to delay or put barriers in the way of reaching a settlement. I have instructed council officers to begin talks to agree terms of reference for negotiations with all parties.”

A spokesman for Anas Sarwar’s leadership campaign said: “Anas has put tackling gender inequality at the heart of his campaign, and has already unveiled plans to create a Labour commission to finally end the gender pay gap once and for all.”

Richard Leonard’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. 

The Fight for Equal Pay (23/12/16)

I've been inspired by a recent Twitter conversation to dig into the blog site archive and revisit the key landmarks in the fight for equal pay in Scotland's local councils.

1. The background to Equal Pay lies in the early 1990s when the big public sector trade unions (GMB, NUPE and TGWU) set out to negotiate a set of common conditions of service for all UK local government workers - with a new 'Single Status' Agreement.
2. The goal of the trade unions was shared, in principle, by the UK employers and this was to end the widespread pay discrimination against low paid, predominantly female, council employees - in caring, cleaning, catering and school support jobs. 
3. The unions warned the employers that if negotiations failed to deliver equal pay, then they would seek to achieve their aims via the courts, since it was obvious to everyone that the employers could not justify a Home Carer being paid the equivalent of only £6.00 an hour while a Refuse Collector was earning £9.00 per hour.
4. At the time Mark Irvine was the Head of Local Government for Unison in Scotland and a key figure in the UK and Scottish negotiations which led to a UK wide agreement in 1997 that, subsequently, became the Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement in Scotland in 1999.
5. Stefan Cross (now a QC) was then a leading employment lawyer with Thompsons Solicitors and fought his first major equal pay case as far back as 1995 before setting up a practice of his own, initially based in Newcastle.
6. The trade unions and employers were both alarmed at this development, as they had completely failed to implement the landmark UK and Scottish Single Status agreements, despite all their fine words about tackling discrimination and delivering equal pay for work of equal value.  
7. Stefan Cross and Mark Irvine met in Newcastle in March 2005 to discuss reviving the fight for equal pay north of the border. In August 2005 Action 4 Equality Scotland was launched in a fanfare of publicity, courtesy of a major BBC Scotland news programme (see post below dated 28 May 2016 along with the original BBC web site report from 2005).
8. All of the Scottish papers followed the story up and after years in the doldrums Equal Pay was front page news once again: Stefan Cross and Stefan Cross Solicitors provided the legal expertise and representation in the Employment Tribunals; Mark Irvine and A4ES became the campaign vehicle to get a message across to potential claimants and the wider public.
9. Glasgow was the first council to be targeted (as the largest in Scotland) and after a few months of posturing and insisting that the City had no equal pay problem, the Council sounded a hasty retreat. By Christmas Glasgow was offering derisory sums of cash to 'buy out' people's claims.
10. Lots of workers succumbed to the temptation, given the Council's 'bullying' tactics and the time of year. The workforce also lacked support from their own Labour-supporting trade unions who had failed to tackle the issue for years, even though all the big councils were Labour controlled, as was COSLA, of course, the self-styled voice of Scottish local government.
11. Glasgow reached an 'interim' settlement of claims with A4ES up to 31 March 2006, but not for the period from 1 April 2006 onwards when the Council introduced new local pay arrangements and a new job evaluation scheme (JES).
12. The hard work of extending the equal pay campaign across Scotland had begun and within two years A4ES was leading the charge in many other councils as well including  Edinburgh, Fife, North Lanarkshire, South Lanarkshire, Falkirk, North Ayrshire and so on.
13. I began writing my blog in January 2007 and restricted myself, initially, to news and reports about the ongoing campaign, but over the years the blog 'grew like 'Topsy' and evolved into something that I enjoy writing for many other reasons as well.
14. Towards the end of 2008 Carol Fox joined Stefan Cross Solicitors (see post below dated 15 October 2008) and assumed responsibility for the day-to-day legal cases in Scotland. 
15. Carol played a key role in the ongoing work in the Employment Tribunals, for example in the successful case against South Lanarkshire Council (SLC). A talented and very feisty woman barrister named Sandhya Drew presented the A4ES case and the long-running tribunal eventually found in the claimants favour.
16. Meanwhile the Scottish Information Commissioner (SIC) got involved after Labour-run South Lanarkshire refused an freedom of information (FoI) request from Mark Irvine. SLC appealed a SIC ruling (in Mark Irvine's favour) requiring the Council to publish information relating to the pay differences between traditional male and female jobs.
17. After losing its appeal case to a unanimous judgement at the UK Supreme Court in London, SLC 'sued for peace' and settlements quickly followed for or over 3,000 A4ES clients. The local unions in South Lanarkshire looked ridiculous, by the way, having previously discouraged their members from pursuing equal pay claims against the local Labour-run Council.
18. Another person that must be mentioned in dispatches, of course, is the indomitable Daphne Romney QC who drove a veritable 'coach and horses' through the pay arrangements that North Lanarkshire Council had introduced in 2007, with the Labour supporting union again playing a very negative role. 
19. Again thousands of low paid, predominantly women workers, were properly compensated after years of unequal pay and having the wool pulled over their eyes by their employers and trade unions. 
20. Carol Fox decided to step back from the fray in the summer of 2015, for personal and family reasons, and since then A4ES has worked with another firm of solicitors HBJ Gateley to provide clients with first class legal support (see post below dated 6 September 2015).
21. Ironically, after all this time has passed things have come full circle again as the equal pay campaign focuses on Labour-run Glasgow, as the only major council in Scotland not to have reached a settlement with A4ES over its post-job evaluation pay arrangements. 

But A4ES, Stefan Cross and Mark Irvine have all been involved from day one - and we are determined to see this fight through to the end. 

  

How It All Began (28/05/16)

Action 4 Equality Scotland burst on to the scene on 15 August 2005 after a BBC Scotland film crew travelled to Newcastle to explain the fight for equal pay that had been raging in the north east on England with Stefan Cross Solicitors leading the way.

Now the trade unions had been huffing, puffing and pontificating about equal pay for many years before AAES came along, but not once did they ever come close to blowing the council employer's house down.

And the reason A4ES has been such a great success is that we don't have any party political connections to the employers and so we don't pull our punches in dealing with the likes of Labour-run Glasgow, North Lanarkshire, South Lanarkshire, and Fife Councils.

Unequal pay could cost councils


A recent campaign highlighted the issue of unequal pay

Local authorities in Scotland could face a bill of about £500m to settle backdated claims for equal pay from women workers in the public sector.

Councils in the north east of England have already paid £75m after claims involving 8,000 women workers.

In 1999 most councils in that region signed equal pay agreements but they failed to implement them.

The Action 4 Equality campaign, which has also won settlements at employment tribunals, is now heading to Scotland.

Legal action

Many north east councils offered compensation to all women employees who had been affected by unequal pay over the years.

Last month Newcastle City Council reached a settlement with trade unions which will benefit 2,800 workers, such as cleaners and care-at-home staff.

Gateshead, Durham City, Sunderland, South Tyneside and North Tyneside have also made multi-million pound payouts.

However, Action 4 Equality, an organisation linked to a firm of solicitors, said that workers could launch legal action against the councils.

It has already secured payouts of up to £34,000 for staff in Redcar and Cleveland.

The Scottish organiser of Action 4 Equality, Mark Irvine, estimated that 50,000 women workers in Scotland could claim.

He claims that if they got the same sort of settlements already paid in England, the bill could be more than £700m.

He told BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland programme that talks with employers so far had proved unhelpful.

Mr Irvine said: "Negotiations between employers and the trade unions have been ongoing for several years and the best brains among them have failed to come up with a solution so far.

"If people want to settle equal pay claims, the best way to achieve that is to take direct action through the employment courts with the support of Action 4 Equality."

Equal value

Council employers said England had suffered from fast buck legal claims which could damage local government in Scotland.

Local authority body Cosla admitted there was a problem but said talks with unions was the best way to reach a solution.

President Pat Watters said: "The people who will get rich with this will not be the workers, but the lawyers negotiating the claims.

"Action 4 Equality is a not a charity organisation but is there to make money, 20% will be creamed off right away for the lawyers. What it is making right now off the backs of workers is millions of pounds."

Mr Watters estimated that the bill for local authorities in relation to pay claims would reach £500m.

He added that money to pay claims would have to come from council taxpayers unless the government stepped in to help out.

A claim under the Equal Pay Act 1970 may be made by either a woman or a man claiming equal pay with one or more comparators of the other sex.

He or she needs to show a difference in pay for doing "like work", "work rated as equivalent" or "work of equal value".