Joan Smith: How the unions betrayed women workers

It's a scandal all right, but not the one you may have encountered in screaming headlines or heard about from angry trade union leaders and Labour MPs. According to their version of events, the villains of the piece are grasping lawyers (now there's a change), who have come along and upset perfectly reasonable deals, designed to give low-paid female workers equal pay, between town halls and trades unions. Who could possibly complain about that?

It turns out that some of them can, and the result is supposedly another example of Britain's compensation culture gone mad. Indeed, if you listen to the doom-sayers, these gullible women and their rapacious advisers are now threatening thousands of jobs, public services and the breakdown of civilisation as we know it. OK, I made the last bit up, but the rest of it is a pretty fair summary of the scare stories in newspapers over the past few days.

The figures being bandied about are sufficiently alarming to obscure the origins of the dispute, and its rights and wrongs. We're told that equal pay claims for 1.5 million public sector workers could cost the taxpayer £10bn, that hundreds of thousands of male council employees could lose up to 40 per cent of their salaries, and that the problem is set to spread to the NHS, where thousands of men may have their pay frozen for two or three years.

In fact, at Birmingham City Council, the country's largest local authority, 40 per cent of staff will get a pay rise, 40 per cent will remain the same and 20 per cent face a pay cut. There will be winners and losers, and some of the wilder claims may well be exaggerated.

The other side of the story, which has received too little publicity in spite of having rather more moral force, is that town halls and trades unions are screaming blue murder because they've been caught out in entrenched patriarchal attitudes. They've been letting down women who work in the public sector for years; women were supposed to get equal pay years ago - remember that quaint piece of legislation, the 1970 Equal Pay Act? - and the fact that it's only being implemented in some town halls on 1 April this year is shocking beyond belief.

Even worse, the public sector unions have done deals designed to prevent women getting the compensation they're legally entitled to, which in itself falls far short of the thousands they've missed out on over the decades.

What is happening here, in other words, is a bizarre inversion in which the victims of a longstanding injustice are being characterised as mounting an inexplicable assault on the pay and status of working-class men. It speaks volumes about the outdated attitudes of both trades unions and employers, who have been happy to go along with scandalously unequal pay structures for decades, as though we still inhabit an economy where men are the breadwinners and women go out to work, if they have jobs at all, for pin money.

Let me spell it out: for many years, dinner ladies, cleaners, canteen assistants and other poorly-paid women workers have been subsidising both their male colleagues and public services in this country. While we've been getting council services on the cheap, female council employees - many of them single mothers, no doubt - have been struggling to pay rent, mortgages, council tax, childcare and pensions on wages substantially less than men in jobs requiring similar skills. The unions for the most part went along with this, protecting the male workforce at the expense of the women.

Equal pay is expensive, you see, and the last thing union reps want is to see men's wages frozen or cut to give women a fair deal. You could argue that such an outcome is fair enough, after men have enjoyed so many years of undeserved advantage, but that's an affront to the aristocracy of the British labour movement, which has always been male. (I wasn't in the least surprised a few years ago when the largest private sector union changed its name to Amicus, rather than the female form Amica.)

The reason public sector employers and unions are now giving dire warnings about pay cuts and freezes is an EU ruling in 2004. The ruling revised the 1970 Equal Pay Act, extending the compensation period for employees who had been underpaid from two years to six - a legal entitlement which the unions chose to ignore when they struck deals with councils to implement next month's new pay structure.

They did it to protect the jobs of male employees by keeping down the combined wage and compensation bill. And before you throw your hands up in horror over the cost of paying all the money the women are entitled to by law, consider this: some of these women have been receiving less than they should for 10 or 20 years, and paying smaller amounts of income tax and national insurance contributions as a result.

Even if they were to get the maximum six years' compensation, they would still be thousands of pounds out of pocket.

Enter the hate figure at the centre of the row, a lawyer named Stefan Cross, who represents 7,000 low-paid women in the North-east. Along with two or three other firms, Mr Cross has been going to court to overturn these sweetheart deals between town halls and unions. Some part-time women workers are being awarded between £10,000 and £30,000 plus damages, which aren't huge amounts when you consider how much they were underpaid over the years.

According to Mr Cross, the unions have been protecting 10 per cent of the workforce at the expense of the 90 per cent of women eligible for pay rises under equal pay legislation. Furious MPs point out that lawyers like Mr Cross act on a no-win no-fee basis, taking up to 30 per cent of the compensation awarded by the courts, but at least they're upfront about it. The public sector unions stand accused of something which is arguably worse, taking women's membership dues and failing to secure either the best deal or the compensation prescribed in law.

Far from being caused by irresponsible women, the financial problems now facing public sector employers are actually a consequence of the historic reluctance to place a proper value on "women's work". Traditionally, when the Labour Party and trades unions pictured the labour they were founded to represent, the figure that came to mind was the working man, and women are still getting a raw deal.

Instead of whining and demanding changes in the law, as some of them are doing, unions and employers should recognise that the era of cheap female labour is finally coming to an end. A democratic modern state should not base its economic viability on a raw deal for millions of employees, any more than it should expect to rely on slavery.

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