Unions under renewed attack for failing low-paid women members

Unions under renewed attack for failing low-paid women members

The courts have lambasted trade unions for misleading their low-paid women members and settling their equal pay claims for too little in recent landmark judgments.

As many as 150,000 women, according to estimates from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), are entitled to compensation from local authorities and the NHS for being paid less than male colleagues, in litigation that now threatens to bring tribunals to 'a grinding halt'.

The Court of Appeal recently upheld an employment tribunal's finding that the GMB trade union 'rushed headlong' into an 'ill-considered back-pay deal' in the case of Allen v GMB and 'accepted too readily the council's plea of poverty'. Appeal judges agreed that the GMB had indirectly discriminated against 26 female workers paid less than their male counterparts when agreeing backdated pay deals following the 1997 'single status' agreement between unions and local authorities designed to eliminate pay disparities.

Lord Justice Maurice Kay, quoting the earlier tribunal ruling, said that the GMB 'failed to give the claimants a fully informed choice about the options', and that claimants were not told that what they were being offered was 'substantially less than they might receive following successful litigation'.

The women were represented by the Newcastle-based 'no win, no fee' lawyer Stefan Cross, who claims to be acting for 40,000 women. He has been accused by the GMB of 'tearing up industrial relations'.....continued below

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and undermining collective negotiation through his firm's targeting of women cleaners, care workers and kitchen staff -often union members - and pursuing individual cases through the courts.

The judge also said that there 'had been not only a failure to provide full information, but also positive manipulation' of, in the words of an earlier tribunal ruling, 'relatively unsophisticated claimants'.

'I have been paying my subs to the GMB for 11 years and the first and only time I have gone to them was over my equal pay claims,' says Sheila Allen, a 57-year-old care worker who has worked for Middlesbrough Council for 19 years and whose claim is the test case. 'What I found out was that we counted for nothing.'

However, GMB national secretary Brian Strutton argues that the recent ruling - along with a second, separate Appeal Court judgment that Redcar and Cleveland council's pay protection scheme had been unlawful because it, in effect, perpetuated inequality - will now 'lead to the conclusion that women need to pursue equal pay cases through litigation based upon individual complaints going through the courts. But the courts can't cope with it.'

The tribunal system 'has complained bitterly' about bearing the brunt of some 44,000 equal pay claims, he says, and points to a 155 per cent increase last year alone.

The EHRC has argued that equal pay cases should be kept out of the courts and dealt with through negotiated settlements.

Ms Allen is one of 26 women who are claiming that they were paid less than male colleagues in their work as cleaners, care workers and other low-salary jobs. Middlesbrough Council disputes this and denies the women have any claim at all. Only one has received any money.