A FAIR PAY FOR A FAIR JOB

Congratulations to all those Staffordshire people awarded honours in the Queen’s New Year’s honours list. I was particularly pleased to read that Christine King, vice-chancellor of Staffordshire University, and Sybil Ralphs have received honours. The award to these prominent local women has come in the same week as the Equal Opportunities Commission’s annual survey which shows that the glass ceiling for women in senior positions is still very much in place. Representation of women in top jobs across the public and private sectors is growing painfully slowly and in some areas has gone into reverse.

This is part of a much wider problem. The Equal Pay Act came into force in 1975 and it enshrined the principle of equal pay for equal work. But the disparity between the earnings of men and women remains substantial. I doubt if this is the result of deliberate discrimination. There are a number of underlying factors and one of them is the ingrained notion of the man as principal bread winner. A related factor is the segregation of men and women within the workplace into different types of job together with pay agreements that reflected their relative negotiating power. Councils have the additional difficulty that bonus payments in addition to basic pay tend applied mainly to jobs staffed by men rather than women. But why is it that attempts by local councils up and down the country to resolve the equal pay problem is resulting in severe financial difficulties for some councils and financial ruin for some council workers?

Ten years ago local authorities agreed nationally to bring together the different conditions of service for manual and white-collar staff. This involved having a single pay spine and ensuring, through job evaluation, that jobs of all staff are fairly placed on the spine. The deadline for achieving this runs out at the end of March and many Councils are rushing to make up lost time.

In Staffordshire, the exercise has resulted in proposals to increase salaries for some staff and to reduce salaries for others. Both of these outcomes are problematic. One of my constituents is facing a salary drop of over £7000pa and I am aware that reductions far exceeding this amount are proposed for other staff. But where staff are benefiting from an increase in salary, the experience of other Councils is that the cost of the exercise is far greater than anticipated. This is because private ‘no win no fee’ solicitors have taken the increase in salary as an admission that there has been discrimination of the staff concerned in the past. Solicitors have then successfully claimed back pay for Council staff going back six years – the maximum permitted by law – and successfully sued trade unions for agreeing to less than the maximum back pay.

The problem therefore is that Councils are facing pressure to provide reasonable salary protection for those with salary reductions while at the same time having to meet expensive back pay claims from staff who have gained salary increases.

I shall be pressing the Government to provide every assistance to our local Councils in implementing the new pay structure. Getting rid of discrimination in pay is an important Government objective and it is right that the Government should provide the means to ensure that it can be implemented fairly.