Glasgow unions ballot for strike after SNP council’s equal pay betrayal
Glasgow City Unison rep
Around 9,000 UNISON members in Glasgow affected by equal pay compensation arrangements are to be balloted for strike action.
The GMB and UNITE trade unions are balloting too, taking the total number of workers involved in the dispute to 14,000.
This is the latest stage in a war for gender equality that saw thousands of low paid women take to the streets in October 2018 in the country’s largest equal pay strike.
Glasgow City Council has now projected that the new pay and grading scheme to address gender pay inequality will not be in place until at least 2024. Meantime the council wants to rip-up a 2019 equal pay compensation deal for future payments and is also refusing to make further interim payments.
The deal in 2019, after the last strike, saw interim payments made to thousands of workers up to 31 March 2018. It is unacceptable that workers are being expected to wait until at least 2024 – six years after their initial payment – for the next step in addressing ongoing gender pay discrimination in Glasgow.
In addition, the council is attempting to divide the workforce by excluding many jobs that were previously paid out.
Future equal pay compensation payments are now under threat for thousands of workers including those in social care, early years nurseries and clerical / admin jobs.
Thousands of workers, overwhelmingly women, were paid out in 2019 because their pay was unequal – nothing has changed since then, it’s still unequal.
The same jobs in the same unequal pay scheme. Yet the council is now refusing to pay up and trying to exclude many jobs. The council’s actions are a cynical ploy to divide trade unionists.
The trade unions are demanding that the council apply the 2019 arrangements to those claimants who have never received anything – so-called “new claims” – and also use the 2019 arrangements to calculate a new round of interim payments for all eligible workers because of the delay in implementing the new pay and grading system.
The fight for pay equality in Glasgow is far from over.
