Dying without ever getting their historic equal pay

[RethinkingLife]

Offered a derisory payment, mislead (including by the Unions!), and the pay gap persisted and worsened.

In the years that followed the settlements, Fox Cross (which was later replaced by Action4Equality Scotland) sought out women in Glasgow to inform them that because of this ongoing discrimination, they could have a new claim. The lawyers leafleted, took out ads in papers and called public meetings. In 2007, Stojilkovic attended one of these meetings and put in a claim with Action4Equality Scotland. Thousands of carers and women in other female-dominated roles such as catering made the same decision.
Care work – involving at-home, one-on-one visits – can be lonely. To offset this, Stojilkovic and a few of her colleagues met up regularly between shifts in the cafe in a Morrisons supermarket. In 2008, at one of these gatherings, they heard the news. The woman who hadn’t signed the document at the leisure centre had won her employment tribunal. She had been awarded £27,000: three times the maximum the council had offered.
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All this makes local authorities particularly badly placed to deal with this new wave of equal pay claims. “In my view it’s a matter of if, not when, more councils go bankrupt,” a policy adviser from the Local Government Association told me. “It’s a timebomb – and no one got out ahead of it.” Amid this web of financial challenges, councils are facing up to the uncomfortable truth that for many years, the books have been balanced on the backs of women.
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In the mid-1980s, local authorities carried out a national job evaluation scheme, which awarded all manual workers, from carers to refuse collectors, the same basic pay. But local authorities failed to address the many added perks for male-dominated jobs, such as bonuses and generous allowances for overtime. “Each local authority developed its own way of enhancing the pay of the men – and they were very creative in the way they did it,” said Cross. Glasgow had more than 120 bonus schemes for its employees, and every single one benefited jobs dominated by men. Often these schemes were the direct result of trade unions, which are traditionally male-dominated, lobbying hard for particular groups of employees.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/01/they-were-dying-and-theyd-not-had-their-money-britains-multibillion-pound-equal-pay-scandal

To add insult to injury, councils who have declared bankruptcy or are signalling that they might, are all pointing to the strain of having to settle equal pay awards that are overdue by decades. Yes, it's totally the women's fault they were discriminated against, persist through being actively deceived and now need the payments for which councils didn't do adequate set aside.

I'm somewhere between livid and distressed for the families of the women who've died without seeing justice. And the women who are still waiting for justice.

Women who were still waiting for their compensation had started dying. Elaine Russell, a home care coordinator who worked all hours to support her family, died when she was just 55. Margaret Gorman, who spent 16 years as a home carer, died at 60. Maureen McDonald, a council catering manager for 13 years, died at 56. “They were overworked, their bodies didn’t get a chance to recuperate,” Stojilkovic said. “They were all dying, and they’ve not had their money.”
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In meetings with council officials, Thomson and Stojilkovic sometimes felt that the women were being blamed for the council’s financial difficulties. “It’s our money that should have been in our purses, and they kept it in their purses,” Thomson said. “They should have treated us with respect, and this would never have happened.”

Working class women who'd had to work horrendously long hours to make ends meet. Dying before their time with discrimination a factor in that - this is wrong and infuriating on so many levels. Across all the councils, this must run into many thousands of women who were impoverished with all the impact that had on their health, quality of life and both the timeand energy for family life.

It is an uncomfortable reality that if councils go bankrupt, the people who lose out the most are its own low-paid workers – many of whom are women – as well as poor people dependent on their services. But the responsibility for this cannot fall on the shoulders of female council workers. “Can we really have a welfare state that only survives if it pays its women unequally and unlawfully?” said Conley, the professor of human resources management.

Westminster has to take a massive share of the blame. The Government has reduced the grants that largely fund local government (especially in the poorest areas) quite cynically, over many years. As noted, it's a pyrrhic victory if equal pay for women means more jobs and services lost. Of course it's not the fault of the claimants, but the money has to come from somewhere. And in the real world, the only place it can come from is the Treasury.

Or you know, the councils could have tried to not continue putting themselves at risk of equal pay claims? Whilst Westminster has made their budgets shocking... councils could have really got their thumbs out their arses and not continued underpaying female employees after their first problems (2007 in this article, earlier I think for Birmingham)

I'm considering raising an equal pay claim against my employer (corporate) in a couple of years. Best case, they pay me to go away and I can retire early, neutral case - nothing happens, worst case... they actually pay me more and I have to keep showing up. The hard challenge in a corporate role is finding a male comparator that 'matches' close enough, within councils, the role matching has already been done, so to be honest, the councils have no excuse.

The Equal Pay stuff has been rumbling on for decades. This was well before the deep cuts from central govt.

And the unions were actively betraying the women and circumventing the job evaluation exercises and misadvising them (until very recently). And they carried on trying to undermine them and ensure they were paid less than the men.

Many thousands of women would plausibly have had more comfortable, healthier, and even longer lives if they'd had their due entitlement.

That's a shocker. I was working in a university in the mid 2000s when HEFCE made it a requirement that all universities did a job evaluation exercise and moved from having many different pay scales to one unified one. Previously, there was a scale for manual jobs like portering, maintenance and so on - mostly done by men - which paid significantly better than the scale for lower-level admin jobs - mostly done by women, of course. All resolved 20 years ago! I believe the NHS was doing a similar exercise around then as well. Councils have really dragged their feet on this.