A new era of equal pay at Glasgow City Council
by It is almost exactly a year since the SNP-led Glasgow City Council made the hugely significant step of abandoning many years of Labour-led legal action on Equal Pay.
Yesterday, the Council made the welcomed announcement that an agreement had been reached to resolve the long-running equal pay dispute.
The issue of equal pay in Glasgow goes back decades. However, the specific claims that were settled yesterday relate to a Labour decision in 2006 to create a complex pay structure, which favoured predominately male roles. You can read more about this here.
Our commitment to resolving this issue has never wavered, unlike the Labour administration that came before.
Instead of having meaningful discussions with staff to address the issue, or even testing the basis of the claims, Labour spent more than £2 million pounds continuing to defend this indefensible pay scheme in court.
In stark contrast, we scrapped the discredited pay and grading system and replaced it with the fairer scheme used by the vast majority of other Scottish councils – something that should have been put in place by Labour in the first place.
We were clear that this was always likely to take at least a year and the sheer volume of cases involved and the complexity of the Council’s pay and grading arrangements were such that this was never going to be easy.
But the women who have been discriminated against won their case the day the SNP assumed control of Glasgow City Council, and everything since then has been a process of delivering justice.
After a decade of obstruction and inaction, in a relatively short space of time we have now reached agreement which delivers the pay justice these women long have fought for.
We now enter a new era of pay equality in Glasgow City Council where we ensure that women’s work is valued and gender equality in on the public agenda.