Can't pay, won't pay?

There are few more significant markers of equality than that of pay. Is the Equality and Human Rights Commission letting women down on this, asks Emine Saner Wednesday January 16, 2008 The Guardian Of all the cases that you might expect the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to back, that of a group of women - mainly caterers and care workers - striving to secure equal pay with their male cohorts seems an obvious one, right? After all, there are few more significant markers of equality than pay, and, besides that, pay equality is written definitively into the law. It is nearly 40 years since the Equal Pay Act was implemented, and this was followed by the Single Status Agreement (SSA) in 1997 - a deal between local government and trade unions to rectify salary discrepancies between men and women. There is a strong structure in place, then, to challenge the fact that women are still paid, on average, a shameful 17% less than men for full-time work and 36% less for part-time work, and this structure has often been successful. In 2005, for instance, 1,600 female health workers, backed by their union, won an equal pay deal of 300m between them. There are currently thousands of equal pay cases being brought against local councils who say that they simply don't have the funds to pay women an equal salary to men, unless they cut male salaries, or jobs, or both. Cross has made a number of equal pay claims against councils, mainly in the north-east, since 2003. He claims that the women involved in these cases have recently been let down, not just by the EHRC, but also by the largely male might of the trade unions, who have avoided putting pressure on local authorities because of the potential for male salaries to be cut. "When it is the interests of men losing out," he says, "they are far more vigorous in defending those issues." It is a concern that others share. "It is not a good start if individuals who believed that this commission would support them suddenly find they don't have that support," says the feminist writer Joan Smith. "Everyone is culpable in this - the government, the trade unions - because for years they did deals where they knew that women weren't getting the pay they should, but there has always been this urge to protect the male breadwinner. Eventually, lawyers come in and see that the law is being broken and move in and say, 'We're going to do the job.' [The pay gap is] a historic injustice that nobody else has got around to correcting and if it takes individual lawyers taking on individual cases to correct that, then I think we have to live with it. For the EHRC to take a different view is very shocking but it also confirms the fears that a lot of us had when the EOC was abolished. It was abolished before it was able to do its job."