In the King’s Speech, 2024, the Labour Government made the bold step of proposing an expansion to the 2010 Equality Act. The Equality (Race and Disability) Bill will extend the “full right” to equal pay and mandatory pay gap reporting to race and disability. Announcing a public consultation in March last year, Seema Malhotra, the Minister for Equalities, declared the bill was at the heart of Labour’s “programme for national renewal”.
The difficult truth is, however, that this legislation will end up achieving the exact opposite of what it intends — helping the poorest in society. Most concerning are the Government’s plans to expand the “full right” to equal pay to race and disability. This proposal has little to do with Barbara Castle’s Equal Pay Act that Labour rightly champions, but rather an obscure piece of legislation the Tories begrudgingly enacted in the 1980s because of the European Court of Justice.
“Work of equal value”, at the heart of this new legislation, is currently only available for gender. Completely different jobs under the same employer are deemed to be of “work of equal value” if they have the same demands of “effort, skill, and decision-making”, according to the 2010 Equality Act. This has caused a whole raft of problems up and down the country, most notably in local authorities.
Birmingham City Council, for instance, has historically paid over £1 billion in equal pay claims. Their most recent equal pay claim, which triggered the council to declare itself effectively bankrupt, was caused by a Covid-era policy that allowed male-dominated jobs like road workers to “leave work early and still get paid for a full shift”, but was not offered to female-dominated council jobs.
Understandably, Labour-run Birmingham decided to tighten up their pay policy to prevent more equal pay claims that could further cripple the Council. This included the abolition of the safety-critical Waste Recycling and Collection Officer (WRCO) role that offers the (predominantly male) bin workers a promotion of £6,000-£8,000. Council leader John Cotton said keeping the WRCO position “would re-open an equal pay claim”, presumably because it is not a promotion available to predominantly female jobs like office staff.
It is hard not to sympathise with Unite the Union, which supports the striking refuse workers. Collecting rubbish is dirty, physically-gruelling and often dangerous. The removal of a safety-critical role and promotion opportunity for staff paid only slightly more than the minimum wage must feel like a kick in the teeth.
The ongoing bin strike therefore, is like an unstoppable force: the trade unions, meeting an immovable object, the equal value pay legislation. Until there are reforms to the Equality Act, there is no obvious solution to this impasse.
Meanwhile, Birmingham has had tens of thousands of tonnes of rubbish left uncollected, with low-paid workers left in economically precarious circumstances as part of a still ongoing all-out strike. As part of a host of Westminster-enforced austerity measures, Birmingham made cuts to adult social care, homelessness prevention, youth services, children’s services and the arts budget, among others.
All this, it must be stressed, has nothing to do with discrimination. There is nothing misogynistic or sexist about Birmingham Council deciding their bin men can leave early if they complete all their set tasks for that day, or offering a promotion to complete a safety-critical role. Women working in male-dominated jobs like refuse workers are paid exactly the same as men; just as men working in predominantly female jobs are paid exactly the same as women.
The estimated total of equal value pay claims to local authorities is at least £3 billion
Birmingham City Council may be an extreme example — it is Europe’s largest local authority, after all. But Birmingham is not an isolated case: research compiled in a report published yesterday by the think tank Civitas shows the estimated total of equal value pay claims to local authorities is at least £3 billion.
There is also a risk that the plans to expand these equal value pay claims will hit the private sector, too. Between them, the supermarkets Asda, Tesco, Morrisons and the Co-Operative have at least 100,000 equal value pay claims. Most of these claims regard paying predominantly female store-front staff the same as predominantly male warehouse staff, despite the considerable differences in their jobs.
As the Civitas report notes, supermarkets are one of the most competitive sectors in the country, with profit margins of on average just 1.8 per cent during the cost-of-living crisis in 2023. Forcing supermarkets to pay store-front staff the same as warehouse staff will either cause price rises for the poorest consumers, or accelerate their transition to online shopping. In an age of “battered” high streets and hollowed city centres, why would Labour want to incentivise major employers leaving the physical retail sector?
If Labour want to help the poorest, they should discontinue their plans to expand equal pay claims, and scale back the Equality Act. It’s the right thing to do.
