Glasgow’s equal pay dispute sparked a heated budget debate as council leader Susan Aitken claimed Labour had cost the city £30m a year for 30 years.
The ongoing saga still needs to be resolved as many workers, predominantly female, continue to be paid unfairly, and thousands of staff are currently being balloted for strike action.
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A settlement, worth over £500m, was agreed in 2019, dealing with pay claims up to March 31, 2018, but a new pay and grading system is required.
Cllr Aitken said Labour had been “stealing the earnings” of women workers, but Labour councillors hit back by saying the SNP had supported the unfair pay scheme.
They also highlighted the dispute has yet to be fully settled, with workers out protesting just this week.
Pay claims between April 2018 and when a new pay and grading scheme is introduced are still to be dealt with. Negotiations are ongoing but the trade unions are unhappy with the amount of time being taken.
Brian Smith, from UNISON, described the issue as “the elephant in the room that the council seems to hope will just go away”.
“That is never going to happen. Glasgow’s women workers will make sure of that.”
During the city’s budget debate, council leader Susan Aitken said Labour and the Tories “can’t dodge their part” in creating the challenges the city faces.
She added: “As for Labour, when they spent years stealing the earnings of women who work for this council, they stole from Glasgow’s future too.
“£30m a year for 30 years, £30m a year less to support the vulnerable, to lift children out of poverty, to repair and improve the fabric of our city, to employ staff and improve services, to adapt and mitigate for the climate emergency.
“There is no budget cut that Glasgow faces like the cut that is caused by Labour’s pay discrimination, what it is costing our communities is frankly horrible to think about.”
Cllr Ruairi Kelly, SNP, described Labour as “the party of pay discrimination”, adding: “Budgets in Glasgow are much more difficult than they need to be as a direct result of the choices made by previous administrations.”
In response, Labour councillors said the SNP had also supported the current unfair pay scheme, which needs to be replaced.
Cllr Stephen Curran, Labour, said: “The SNP supported the existing pay scheme and they’ve still not resolved it. As GMB Scotland has said in communication to its members, for the equal pay ballot that is ongoing right now, stop playing games.”
And Labour’s Cllr Matt Kerr added: “It’s quite obvious that councillors across the parties aren’t all evil and didn’t intend to steal from people as Cllr Aitken chose to characterise it.
“Maybe the quality of advice wasn’t what it could have been at the time and things have moved on.”
He added the issue has “not moved on sufficiently because it hasn’t been settled and everyday that goes past, it costs us more”. “We’ve heard time and time again today that it’s been settled.
“Well there were people up at Castlemilk shopping centre yesterday standing in a howling gale protesting about this very issue. I don’t think they would have been doing that if this had been settled.”
Bailie Martin Bartos, an independent councillor, said the errors of a previous Labour administration had “lasting consequences”.
But he added: “To the extent that it was a political failure by any Labour administration not to fix the problem sooner, it was also a political error for those responsible for scrutiny, in those days the SNP to object more strongly.”
