Equal Pay and the Gender Pay Gap

Graham P Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 1st July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Melanie Onn]

I agree absolutely. We have seen the demise of collective bargaining in many different areas and employers are now moving further away from those agreements.

Previously, for example, the Labour Government had agreed a national arrangement for teaching assistants, but the coalition decided not to continue with the national pay negotiating body. Teaching assistants are, obviously, largely women, largely part time and largely low paid, and on term-time-only contracts. I know from my constituency and from people I have represented as an official of Unison that some earn as little as £5,000 or £7,000 a year, working in our schools and supporting our children when they most need additional support. That problem is being exacerbated by the move away from collective bargaining and those people are more prone to being exploited and having their wages squeezed.

[Graham Jones (Hyndburn) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making some powerful points in a strong speech. She has mentioned the living wage and many local authorities are trying to elevate the circumstances for low-paid workers, particularly the women workers about whom we have heard, by becoming living wage councils. Surely that is a step forward that all councils should look to take.

[Melanie Onn]

I shall come to that point shortly.

If I can just make some progress—I have been dying to say that—to tackle unequal pay, it is imperative that we tackle the low-skill, low-wage economy that is particularly detrimental to women. Much of the success of the previous Labour Government was down to the introduction of the minimum wage. With 27% of women earning less than the living wage, the Government must do more to raise wages. If they will not do that by raising the minimum wage, they must commit actively to support SME businesses to pay the living wage and legislate for FTSE 100 companies to do the same. The forthcoming cuts to tax credits will only make the problem of low pay worse. If the Government want tax credits to be replaced by higher wages, they need to be active in making that happen and should not simply cut, and cross their fingers.

I completely concur with the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Hyndburn (Graham Jones) about living wage councils. I have been active in securing living wage agreements in four different local authorities. That needs to be championed across the board and we must ensure that when those councils make arrangements for any contractors to undertake services on their behalf those companies should also be living wage employers.

The Government need to accept that many zero-hours contracts are exploitative and that people cannot properly manage their household budget if they do not know what they will be earning from one week to the next. The change to exclusivity clauses is welcome, but it ignores the wider problem. Something needs to be done to make the lives of people in insecure work more manageable. I will always believe that when a job exists, a proper contract of employment should be provided. The Conservative Government claim to be on the side of working people, yet when they are presented with an opportunity such as this genuinely to improve people’s working lives, they squirm about like a worm at the end of a line.

It is simply not good enough. People need change and they need it now. Take the Government’s commitment to 30 hours of free childcare for working parents. First, I am pleased to see that they have adopted another of the previous Labour Government’s pledges to support working families. In the race to win votes ahead of the general election, they made a commitment they cannot afford. It is massively underfunded. It costs on average £4.53 an hour to provide the care, but the Government are offering only £3.88 an hour. Perhaps the Minister can tell us where the rest of the money is coming from. If it comes at the expense of child tax credit or working families tax credit, the Government are merely giving with one hand but taking away with the other.

I want to finish by saying that I recently met representatives of a local charity in my constituency called Care, which provides emergency food aid in Grimsby, and they told me that the number of meals that they provide to children has increased by 27% this year alone. Unfair wages for women is a problem of basic fairness, but the fact that working women are being pushed into poverty and insecurity to the extent that they can no longer afford to feed their children is a crisis that surely demands urgent action.