Equal Pay

Debate between Emily Thornberry and Sandra Osborne

Wednesday 18th March 2015 Westminster Hall

[Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Weir. I thank hon. Members for taking the time to discuss this matter with me and to give their points of view. I hope that this debate will be part of a larger one. It is about time we had that.

Forty-five years ago, Barbara Castle’s Equal Pay Act 1970 inspired a generation of young women and girls, which included me. I was a member of St Mary’s church choir in Guildford the year the Act was passed and I was galvanised into action when I heard that the boys in a church choir in the same parish were getting paid twice as much as we were. With my friends, Bryony and Lesley, I wrote to the rector to complain about that great injustice. That did not go well. He showed what he thought of our protest in his next school assembly when he gave us an honourable mention in his sermon on avarice and greed. While I was inspired by that landmark law, I never imagined that I would be here today, talking about the need for a new one. However, like many other products of the 1970s—Status Quo, mood rings and cassette tapes—the Equal Pay Act has not really stood the test of time.

Thanks to the hit film and west end musical “Made in Dagenham”, many who were not around at the time are now familiar with the circumstances that helped the Equal Pay Act into being. In 1968, women sewing-machinists at Ford’s Dagenham plant walked out after their jobs were classified as less skilled, allowing managers to pay them 15% less than men doing comparable work. The women, who made car seat covers, managed to bring about a complete halt in the plant’s car production during their three-week strike. However, much more than that, they were the catalyst for a series of events that included a 1,000-strong rally for equal pay in Trafalgar square the following year, which culminated in the passage of legislation that, for the first time, explicitly outlawed the unequal treatment of men and women with regard to pay and terms and conditions of their employment.

On Second Reading, Barbara Castle rightly hailed the Equal Pay Act as an

“historic advance in the struggle against discrimination in our society”.—[Official Report, 9 February 1970; Vol. 795, c. 914.]

It certainly was an advance. Today, the wage gap between men and women is a quarter of the size it was at that time. I am afraid, however, that that was not a perfect solution, as Barbara acknowledged at the time. As anyone who was around then will know—as will those who have seen “Made in Dagenham”—the Equal Pay Act was a product of a time when, all too often, pay discrimination was blatant. Many women knew that they were being paid less than their male colleagues for no reason other than being women. The Act was crafted to fit the challenges the situation presented and the time of its passage. As such, its approach was essentially reactive. For example, a woman had to find a comparator: a male colleague who was paid more for similar work. She then had to marshal evidence to present to a tribunal. If successful, she would be compensated for loss of wages and achieve equal pay for the future.

That sounds like an entirely reasonable and simple solution, and at the time it was, but a law written to give women the tools to fight blatant discrimination was, perhaps inevitably and understandably, a blunt instrument. For a start, compensation paid to an individual was limited to that individual. At that stage there was no understanding of the importance of looking also at the impact on others affected in the same way and there was no requirement for offending employers to correct practices that led to such discrimination in the first place. Therefore, unless a claimant joined in an action at the outset, a sister colleague working in the same plant, doing the same work, would have to relitigate the matter from scratch even if her colleague had made a successful claim in identical circumstances. It has never been easy to take an employer to a tribunal, even before the near disappearance of legal aid for employment law cases and the introduction of tribunal fees that have led to an immediate 79% drop in the number of equal pay claims and that have been called—I think rightly—a tax on justice. However, there is more to it than that.

A fundamental problem with the Equal Pay Act is that its authors could not have predicted the extent to which the rise of fractured employment practices and insecure working have changed the context in which the law operates today. As Karon Monaghan, QC, a leading employment law specialist, has pointed out, the requirement that a male comparator be employed by the same employer, or an associated employer at the same establishment, causes

“very significant disadvantage to women employed in public sector services that have been contracted out to private contractors”.

Similarly, the increased fragmentation of pay setting in large organisations has undermined women’s ability to bring a claim under the Act. Robertson v. the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is a case in point. Civil servants employed by DEFRA sought to bring a claim using a male comparator at the Department for Transport. The Court of Appeal held that, although civil servants were all employees of the same Government, the claim could not be directed at a single source because pay was devolved for individual Departments to determine.

Many other loopholes have helped mire the legislation in inefficiency. Perhaps the most ridiculous is that the law explicitly states that a comparator must be someone employed at the time. Therefore, if a woman leaves a job and a man takes it and gets paid much more, that cannot be used as a comparator. Frankly, that is ridiculous and flies in the face of common sense. That is exactly the sort of thing that should be classed as discrimination and that any Equal Pay Act ought to deal with. I should clarify that I am not by any means blaming the authors of the 1970 Act for flaws that have bogged the legislation down in the intervening years. They were pioneers in the fight for equality and I applaud them. My point is simply that they were addressing the circumstances of their time and what has become increasingly clear to me and others who have studied this issue is that if we truly want to eradicate unequal pay once and for all, we need to follow their example and craft a new law that is fit to meet the new challenges of our time.

[Sandra Osborne (Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. When the Equality Act 2006 was passed, it was believed that voluntary pay audits would help to solve the problem. They have not, but she is illustrating how they are not the answer in any case. Does she agree that we need to take a whole new look at the law on equal pay?

[Emily Thornberry]

I agree completely. While I am pleased that, at last, the Government have now said that they will introduce that section of the Act, we have wasted a large amount of time on arguing over this matter. That minimal change could and should have been implemented much earlier than it will be. However, progress is progress and that should be recognised. I think that leaving it to the good will of companies to do audits led to only five of them doing them. Clearly that is not anything like sufficient.

To go back to Second Reading of the 1970 Act, Barbara Castle was prescient in asking, “What, then, of evasion?” She knew that there were circumstances—foreseen or unforeseen—that could allow the spirit of the law to be undermined. At the time, she said:

“I have no doubt that some employers will try it on…undoubtedly, pockets of discrimination will remain—unless women organise to put a stop to it.”—[Official Report, 9 February 1970; Vol. 795, c. 928.]

A number of women have followed on from Barbara Castle. Her fighting spirit has lived on through the generations of Labour women who succeeded her and in such a debate it is only right that I recognise them. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), who joined Parliament when it was 97% male in 1982, has led the way in fighting for many changes that we take for granted today, such as a national minimum wage; longer maternity leave; higher maternity pay; the Equality Act, as has been referred to; and measures to promote pay transparency, which are a vital tool in tackling pay inequality.

Transparency must be the bedrock of a renewed effort to close the wage gap. As my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) said when making the case for her Equal Pay (Transparency) Bill:

“Pay transparency would push companies to focus on why the pay gap still exists”.

Further, she said that it

“places the responsibility on employers to be actively conscious of the law on equal pay, and to have policies to address the gap.”—[Official Report, 16 December 2014; Vol. 589, c. 1301.]

She is absolutely right. Perhaps it is a call to action.