YouScotland - Guest Blog

Mark Irvine

Empty promises and equal pay

Action4Equality's Mark Irvine slams an unfair system and trade union conivance in it

Hands up, who supports equal pay? Everyone does, don’t they, because Scotland has come a long way since women worked just for ‘pin money’.

But, if this is true, why are so many women workers still paid so much less than male colleagues? Especially when women have had the law on their side – the 1970 Equal Pay Act – for almost 40 years? The answer is that employers and trade unions have turned a blind eye to widespread pay discrimination for years. This explains why council carers - with highly demanding and responsible jobs - earn less than relatively unskilled male jobs, such as refuse workers and road sweepers.

Whatever they say about an unshakeable commitment to equality, the big public sector employers have been quietly defending the indefensible for years – and the trade unions have been happy to look the other way. In 1999, Scotland’s local councils and trade unions signed an historic equal pay agreement. The proposed new system was intended to pay all workers fairly – regardless of gender, on the basis of real skills and responsibilities – recognising that old, outdated employer/union agreements undervalued and underpaid many predominantly female jobs.

A new approach required non-discriminatory job evaluation schemes - that assessed and scored jobs relative to one another - to produce a fair and logical set of grades and rates of pay - across the entire workforce. But what actually happened was nothing - for six long years. Then Action 4 Equality and Stefan Cross came along - let the cat out the bag by highlighting the big pay differences between male and female jobs – and explaining how to fight back. Overnight, thousands of women workers started submitting equal pay claims – using the courts to get redress.

Collective bargaining had betrayed the very people it was supposed to serve. Predictably, the employers blamed the trade unions and the unions blamed the employers – even though both sides knew exactly what they were signing for at the time. Worse followed. Instead of being honest and acting with integrity, the unions collaborated with employers to keep their women members in the dark – ignored the huge and ongoing pay gap. This duplicity has led to thousands of low paid women workers suing their own trade unions for the lack of proper legal advice and professional support.

Pay discrimination is also rife in Scotland’s NHS. Again the employers and trade unions came up with a similar solution – Agenda for Change – a new grading system, which has been sold as dealing with equal pay, but is nothing of the sort. Instead, Agenda for Change is a mechanism for protecting men's pay and avoiding equal pay claims. NHS pay structures are completely crazy. The equal pay gap has been widely known to employers and unions - since 1997 at least - when large-scale claims were first made in Cumbria.

Cumbria’s claims established that nursing assistants did jobs of equal value to male maintenance workers, but the men were being paid £4,000 more than the (largely female) nurses. Likewise, fully trained and highly qualified nurses earned less than male electronics technicians - medical secretaries less then male painters and joiners. Even senior nurses - with years of specialist training - were paid less than junior maintenance managers. So the people looking after property were paid more than those caring for patients!

Recent events have shown unions up in their true colours. Unions like to portray themselves as champions of equal pay, but collective bargaining has let women workers down – big time. The difference is that people now have a choice – they don’t need to stay trapped inside the secret world of employer/union agreements – a kind of industrial relations ‘black hole’. That’s why so many are prepared to hold the unions to account – and consider other solutions to their problems.
Scotland’s unions have lost the plot on equal pay. Women workers have been betrayed by a tribal male culture, driven by windy rhetoric, wedded to one political party, compromised and ultimately paralysed by its own vested interests.

For the latest news on equal pay visit the Action4Equality website www.action4equalityscotland.blogspot.com

Iain McWhirter

Young Scotland to Power!

Politcal columnist tuned YouScotland.com guest blogger Iain McWhirter wonders when young people are going to start the fightback.

What We Really Need is a Scottish Younger Citizens Unity Party....Grey power is on the march in the Scottish election, with the Scottish Senior Citizens Unity Party fielding a range of candidates across Scotland like former Glasgow provost Pat Lally.   Good on them,  you might say - pensioners have had a raw deal in the past, the state pension is a disgrace, and too many are living in poverty.But hang about. A lot of them aren't actually living in poverty.  Quite the reverse:  80% of the wealth in this country is now held by people over t he  age of 50. 

The present generation of older people is the richest in history, largely because they have enjoyed a quarter of a century of house price increases, index linked occupational pensions and measures like free personal care, free travel, free prescriptions and a whole range of tax breaks.  The truth is that the over fifties have never had it so good.

Contrast the situation facing younger people today. The under thirties have the burden of five figure student debt, unlike their parents who had free higher education.  They face the near impossibility of buying a house because wealthy older people, with no children, are sitting tight in their investments to take advantage of untaxed capital gains.   What's worse, older people have bought up all the flats as buy-to-let investments to boost their pension portfolios, meaning that prices and rents keep rising.

The average age of a first time buyer in Scotland is now 37.  It's hardly surprisng that six out of ten young men in Britain still stay in the family home. The result is a generation of "kidults" - young adults who are still tied to their parents long after they should be living independent lives and starting families of their own. Forty percent of women are single at the age of 35. No wonder Scotland has a population problem.

We are supposed to be a youth-obsessed ageist society, so  how has this happened?  Well to some extent it's a numbers game.  The baby boom generation, of people born after the Second World War, has moved through life dominating every era it touches - from the "my generation" Sixties to the "greed is good" Eighties and on to the "have-it-all"  Noughties.  There are just so many of them, that people under the age of thirty have fallen below the political radar.Moreover, people over the age of fifty are twice as likely to vote in elections. 

That's why some politicians are so eager to scrap council tax, which hits wealthy older people living in big houses and places the burden on the incomes of young families starting out on the housing ladder.  The  SNP and the Liberal Democrats say that it is unfair that pensioners living in large houses should have to pay large property taxes.  But there is one solution:  they could sell their houses to families who need the space, and downsize.

One reason property is so expensive is that older people have a monopoly of it and they won't let go. Take Bearsden in Glasgow.  This used to be a prime family suburb, somewhere to raise children in safety and space.  Now it is almost exclusively the preserve of older people living in large houses they don't need. There is no incentive for them to vacate because their houses are such good earners, increasing in value by far more each year than the average wage.  Property is the one form of asset wealth that is exempt from wealth taxes. Now the parties are wanting to make it even easier for them by exempting houses from local taxation altogether.

This is an abomination. A great injustice is being perpetrated here.  What we really need is a a Scottish Young Persons Unity Party, to combat inequality in the treatment of younger adults.   In the past, we had class inequality, then gender inequality, but the great divide today is a generational one. So why don't we hear the voice of youth protest any more?  Well, unfortunately this generation of under thirties somehow failed to learn the habits of dissent and protest that their parents developed to such effect.  Somehow, it didn't cross the generational divide. Yet, if the older of people today had faced the kind of economic discrimination that is being suffered by their children, they'd never have stood for it.  They would have  been out on the streets before you could say "Maggie Maggie Maggie, Out Out Out" .  There would've  been marches through the suburbs, house occupations, pickets of estate agents. Demands for a mass programme of house building, higher taxes on unearned income, and end to student debt.

So, young people of Scotland here is your opportunity. There is an election going on.  Get involved, make a noise, register to vote, alert your friends, lobby your MSPs.  I can assure you that the media would love it because young people are, well, young and attractive, fashionable and colourful.  Here is a chance to make your mark on society.  Kick out the jams, people - just like Mum and Dad did.

Lesley Riddoch

ScottishVotePod '07

Journalist and Broadcaster Lesley Riddoch is trying to put some life back into political hustings. As the first of a series of youscotland.com guest bloggers she explains why, and the story so far......

Four down – six to go. I’m fronting ten Votepod debates with voluntary groups across Scotland and a small posse of ex NCR and BBC friends. Believing in the power of public debate seems to be as last season as wearing a Dr Who scarf these days. But big, robust debates that use technology to get on itunes and YouTube are quite simply the future. And the first two votepod debates are proving it.

First up – they’re not meetings but events fronted by musicians. Well, why should you get a warm up act when you’re going to be entertained but nothing when you’re going to be proselytised? The highlights are podcast on itunes – why should you have to be in a hall to hear what’s gone on there? And videocast – why should full formal outside broadcasts be the only way political events are ever seen? Some of the events are using votepads – why should you only vote in polling booths?

All are held in bigger venues than originally planned – why should anyone want to spend an evening in a draughty church hall (no offence to churches.) And all are the product of voluntary orgs reaching beyond their own groups to break down the silos that bedevil the Third Sector – about time too. Some will have non politicians! on the panel – if Question Time can do it why shouldn’t election hustings lineups vary the mix too? The facilitator (myself) is in the audience – why add another heavyweight to the platform when the audience need a “champion” to operate effectively? And all have had months of preparation and co-ordination with halls, equipment hire, politicians, volunteers and our newspaper sponsors the Herald.In short, although these debates may look kinda normal, they kinda aren’t.

We’ve been backed by the Big Lottery Fund, BT and Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust to see if “tricks” of the entertainment trade can help restore the vitality of political public meetings. My own experience suggests people are fed up with un-entertaining events – not with politics. And until all concerned have pulled out all the stops to transform meetings from the gloomy Victorian “sage on the stage” efforts we currently call political dialogue, I don’t think anyone can dare write off the public as apathetic. Have a look and listen to the highlights so far and make your own minds up. What we’re finding is that making meetings work is enormously time consuming because it involves contact with lots of people – many of whom are volunteers themselves. Audio (as ever) delivers far better understanding and content. Video is great for small “sound-bite” moments. Anything longer takes too long to edit or contains too many distractions.

And some candidates are finding the issue focus tough. Labour’s Sylvia Jackson and Sarah Boyack for example are strong, capable Labour MSPs. But both were sent into specialist debates where they were the local candidates – not the specialists. In the face of cross questioning from an expert audience of pensioners and students respectively, and well briefed specialist opposition MSPs (not generally local candidates) they’ve come unstuck. It can make a great spectacle as Labour candidates are shown to have big gaps in their knowledge of the issue in hand. But it isn’t actually fair to those MSPs or to Labour.

The irony is that one man bands like Tommy Sheridan are like walking Wikipedias because they have to be. There is no-one else to fall back on. Labour MPSs are numerous enough that they can rely for briefing from someone else before they "do battle". And just as that strategy falls apart at exams – if only Coles Notes could sit in the exam room – so it can fall apart on hustings platforms. But most voters listening to Tommy Sheridan – Solidarity’s persuasive front of house – will not have the opportunity to vote for him. They’ll be voting for much less experienced, articulate performers delivered by the charisma of their leader. Is that fair? Are hustings fair? Maybe the beauty of them is they’re not.

In the controlled world that is political debate 2007, a haphazard and un-level playing field is a Godsend. So if you want to come … don’t just sit there.

Book tickets scottishvotepods@yahoo.co.uk

listen to what you’ve missed on www.scottishvotepods.com or at this Herald site

Where to find Votepod 07 meetings