WHEN the Labour Party was ousted from government at the 2010 general election, departing Treasury secretary Liam Byrne left a note for his coalition successor in which he cheerily warned “I’m afraid there is no money”.
If you think that was in poor taste it is nothing compared to the metaphorical two fingers the party gave the SNP in Glasgow when, last year, it bequeathed the nationalists not only control of the city council, but of its blatantly unwinnable equal-pay fight too. Cue a couple of decisions from the Court of Session and the current administration has been left staring down the barrel of a multi-million-pound liability that should have been settled years ago.
The problem is that the longer the issue has been allowed to fester the bigger that liability has become and the authority appears to be at a loss as to how to deal with it. Though council leader Susan Aitken committed in January to agreeing a settlement this year, so far nothing has been forthcoming, with the women’s legal and trade union representatives accusing the council of burying its head in the sand over even the most basic of issues.
Unsurprisingly, the women are irate, and those who are members of the Unison and GMB trade unions are preparing for strike action that could see key cleaning, caring and cooking services in the city grind to a halt in the coming weeks. Yet while their anger is understandable and their cause is deserving of support, the prospect of the strike is worrying precisely because of what it is designed to achieve.
All industrial action has an end point in sight, whether it be to increase wages or protect existing rights, and the end point for the Glasgow strikers is to force an immediate settlement of these long-overdue claims. The problem is, if Glasgow settles now it is likely to open itself up to further claims of discrimination in the future, with the perfect storm of its discredited pay structure and its obligations under pensions legislation putting any woman approaching retirement at risk.
A 2014 update to local government pension rules means that pension contributions must be paid on all equal-pay settlements. Yet because pensions are calculated based on salary, any claimant retiring before Glasgow replaces its pay scheme - something it has committed to do, but which could take years to complete - will have paid extra into the Strathclyde fund without the guarantee of receiving the correct pension in return.
No wonder Glasgow is baulking at the prospect of brokering a deal. Nor is it the only local authority to freeze in the face of its pension obligations, with the Herald on Sunday revealing at the weekend that councils across the country are playing fast and loose with the pensions legislation, to the degree that some are complying with it while some are merely thinking about it and others are ignoring it altogether.
The end result is that women are being discriminated against simply because of the area they chose to live and work in, with an equal-pay cleaner in Dumfries and Galloway getting her pension rerated long before the law was changed to say that was her right while her counterpart in Argyll & Bute has effectively been told to whistle.
And so, while some councils grapple with what should be a simple concept, the women who help keep this country going with their daily graft are being left to suffer the consequences. Indeed, while it seems clear that Glasgow City Council has neither the means nor the wherewithal to give its equal-pay women what they deserve, the scatter-gun approach councils in general are taking to observing their pension obligations is creating yet another layer of inequality. The fact that that layer lies between the very women that were discriminated against in the first place is beyond ironic - and beyond unacceptable.
Which is why, far from taking their strike to the streets of Glasgow, the city’s workers should be leading women from every part of the country in a march to the gates of Holyrood to demand the Scottish Government intervenes. Councils have had long enough to tinker around the edges of equal pay; it is time a higher power took control to ensure uniform justice for all.
Such action would likely be a success, too, if recent history is anything to go by. Indeed, just last year First Minister Nicola Sturgeon cut short an official engagement in Germany to come to the aid of the male workers of troubled engineering firm BiFab after they took the fight for their livelihoods to the streets of Edinburgh. The Government handed over a total of £35 million and helped broker the buyout of BiFab by Canadian firm JV Driver, even though the dire straits the business had been floundering in meant practically all the workers went on to lose their jobs anyway.
But if hundreds of boiler-suited men marching on parliament can prompt such a reaction, just think what thousands of tabard-wearing women could achieve. Who knows, they might even be able to force the Government to sort this whole mess out in time for the 50th anniversary of the 1970 Equal Pay Act. And wouldn’t that be something?
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