Workplace Pay Gaps

Brian Leishman Excerpts
Tuesday 7th January 2025

(2 days, 20 hours ago)

Westminster Hall
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Brian Leishman Portrait Brian Leishman (Alloa and Grangemouth) (Lab)
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It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Roger. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Brent East (Dawn Butler) for bringing this important issue to the fore. As a declaration of interest, I am a proud member of Unite the union and the Community union.

At the heart of this debate is the ongoing problem of inequality and, ultimately, who actually holds the power in our country, which has been the consistent issue that workers have faced for centuries. The truth is that our country and our economy has always been run for the benefit of the few—historically, those who owned the land and its resources, and the people who worked on it. Whoever controls that will have wealth; therefore, inequality is not a new phenomenon. If I may be permitted a little more history, the creation of the Labour party in 1900 meant that at last the working class and the trade union movement had an effective voice in Parliament. But for women, it took until 1928, when the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928 was passed, to deliver them equal voting rights with men. However, pay discrimination for women is still an issue.

To focus specifically on Scotland, the Scottish Trades Union Congress, using the Office for National Statistics annual survey of hours and earnings, has shown that women in Scotland can expect to earn an incredible £3,000 a year less than men. That gender pay gap rose from 6.4% in 2023 to 8.3% in 2024, up by 30%. While the typical Scottish male has seen their hourly pay increase by £1, a Scottish female has seen it increase in comparison by 74p: yet more inequality built into our society.

That is sadly reflected when we look at local government workers in Scotland, approximately three quarters of whom are female. Local authority workers need and deserve a wage that genuinely reflects their worth and value to society. After 17 years of the SNP’s own brand of austerity, the Scottish Government must now invest in workers and the public services that people so drastically rely on.

An article published yesterday described how a FTSE 100 boss’s hourly pay has now hit £1,298. That shows the gross inequality and unfairness that exists in workplaces. The huge disparity between pay for those at the very top of industry and their staff—those who generate that wealth—has grown bigger. We cannot look at pay inequality in isolation because, in the ongoing fight for a fairer society, multiple issues must be linked. In Britain today, as well as pay inequality, millions of people are in the grip of food poverty, living in substandard housing, in a society where, overall, many are victims of tax injustice. We are still a country where wealth and power continues to be concentrated in the hands of corporations and not ordinary working people.

The truth is that the cost of living crisis has not gone away, but it is not a crisis for the banks, supermarkets, utility companies or individual oligarchs who have seen their wealth explode. Austerity and the cost of living crisis have been crises for the poorest, most vulnerable, the most disadvantaged and the working class. Thankfully, over the last two years the British Labour movement has led the fight against insatiable corporate greed and avarice. The collective power of trade unions as an effective fighting force for workers’ rights has thankfully been re-established. The fight for equality in the workplace and across society, just like the cost of living crisis, goes on.

Roger Gale Portrait Sir Roger Gale (in the Chair)
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We now come, slightly earlier than anticipated, to the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.