By Richie Venton, SSP Workplace Organiser
“Bring it on!”
That’s the most common expression of women battling for equal pay justice, in the wake of an absolutely astonishing majority vote for strike action.
Members of the GMB in Glasgow City Council areas like home care, catering and cleaning voted by a sweeping 97.8% YES to strike action, as did 96% of UNISON members in their simultaneous ballots.
Although smaller sectors of the workforce, like Glasgow Life, voted 81% in favour of strike action for pay justice, they just narrowly missed the outrageous 50% threshold – imposed by the Tories as a high hurdle to make legal industrial action well nigh impossible. The same Tories who seized power on the basis of just 29% of the UK electorate and a derisory 19% of registered voters in Scotland, imposed anti-democratic, anti-union laws that prevent an 81% majority of voters having their decision count, because 50% of all potential voters didn’t vote. This makes the result in the main groups of council workers all the more remarkable; smashing through the Tory barriers, with almost literally nobody voting against strike action.
Broken Promises
This fight for equality has dragged on since at least 2007. For over a decade, the ruling Labour council consciously, brutally denied thousands of women workers equal pay, despite the High Court ruling their pay and grading system ‘unfit for purpose’.
Then in 2017, the SNP swept to office in Glasgow on a manifesto highlighting their promise to rapidly implement pay equality, for women robbed of at least £3-an-hour, year after year.
Contrary to their election pledge, the SNP dragged their feet, until the biggest equal pay strike in UK history was staged by 8,000 workers in October 2018. This dramatic, powerful action forced the council into a deal that issued thousands of workers with interim payments to compensate for the unequal pay they’d suffered up to 2018, with promises of a complete overhaul of the council pay and grading system by April 2021, through a Job Evaluation exercise designed to achieve equal pay, going forward.
SNP Divide and Rule
That deadline has been and gone. For four years these (overwhelmingly women) workers have been robbed of wages, every hour of every day since 2018. Worse still, the SNP council has stooped to divide-and-rule tactics by trying to exclude thousands of previously included workers from any future interim payments, and delayed the deadline for Job Evaluation until April 2024 – which most of the workforce think is an utterly unrealistic timescale, leading to their demand for immediate, further interim payments for the long hard years they’ve worked since 2018.
In the face of mounting workers’ anger and impatience at their antics, and the ballots for strike action to force them to cough up, the SNP council has begun to beat a retreat, anxious to avoid strikes in the run-up to the May Council elections – but in a fashion once again designed to divide-and-conquer the workforce.
They’ve just this week conceded that they’ll issue interim payments to ‘new claimants’ – workers always entitled to such payments, who for various reasons hadn’t lodged claims in the past, often because they mistakenly thought they’d automatically get pay-outs alongside those referred to as ‘historic claimants’. But not a word so far about compensation to the latter, for the years of pay inequality since 2018.
A mighty battle looms, with a workforce furious and determined to win pay justice, as demonstrated by the landslide votes for strike action. The SNP council face the choice: pay up now, or face thousands of council workers on strike, picketing and demonstrating as the incumbent SNP councillors plead for votes to retain their seats!
Scottish Labour Hypocrisy
Whilst workers undoubtedly welcome support from anyone in their struggle, it’s a bit rich, to put it very politely, for most Scottish Labour politicians to claim to side with them, after Labour’s appalling record in office, prior to 2017. They were kicked out by the people of Glasgow that year in no small measure due to their vicious refusal to grant equal pay, which they even used Court action to try and block.
Solidarity of the SSP
The Scottish Socialist Party has a proud, clean record of standing up for equal pay, before, during and since the 2018 strikes. We have actively given our solidarity in the current battle for pay justice. The SSP as a whole, and all SSP candidates in May’s elections, are determined to build solidarity with these women workers in our own trade unions and communities. And we say that if the council lacks the funds to compensate workers for decades of wage robbery, they should get up on their hind legs, alongside the unions, and demand the funds off the Scottish government to end this scandalous theft of workers’ just entitlements.
Nor should they get away with begrudgingly granting interim payments at the expense of cuts to jobs or other services.
The SSP, in common with council workers’ unions, calls for a No Cuts Budget in defiance of the Tory cuts, meekly passed down by the Holyrood government. And we advocate a massive campaign by trade unionists and communities to win back some of the stolen £millions off central government, to defend all services, meet the current council workers’ pay claim for £3,000 across the board, underpinned by a £12-an-hour minimum wage for all council workers – with immediate equal pay for women.