Yes, as Wes Streeting says, it is ‘unacceptable’ for rubbish to be left piling up on the streets of Birmingham as the binmen go on strike. But neither he nor all the other government figures complaining about the strike should forget its cause. It is the fallout of Birmingham City Council going bust as a result of an equal pay claim brought by cleaners who complained they were not paid as much as binmen. It was a case based on the principle of ‘work of equal value’. It is not case of men and women working alongside each other in the same jobs being paid different rates; rather it is a case of an employment tribunal deciding that cleaners’ jobs and binmen’s jobs constitute ‘work of equal value’ and – given that cleaning is an occupation dominated by women and emptying bins is dominated by men – that it is therefore discriminatory to pay the former less than the latter.
The open-ended liability created by the concept of ‘work of equal value’ was clear when I wrote about it here back in 2014. So it has proved. Not only did the case lead to a huge bill for back pay which helped drive Birmingham City Council to bankruptcy. It also resulted in the wages of binmen being held down, with the resulting strike action.
If you are an employer setting wage rates for various staff you have to second guess how an employment tribunal will assess what are two completely different jobs. The concept of work of equal value throws a spanner into the workings of the labour market. If a council finds itself with a shortage of binmen and finds that it has to raise wages in order to attract more recruits, from now on it will have to extend a pay rise to cleaners, too, even if it has no shortage of them. There is no real discrimination going on here – that would only occur if female cleaners were told that they were not allowed to retrain for working on bin lorries, or that if women working on dustcarts were paid less than the men they were working alongside.
It surprised me when I first looked into it that the discrimination law used by Birmingham City Council’s cleaner was actually the work of Mrs Thatcher’s government. While she took on the public sector unions at the time, she also managed to hand them a weapon of mass destruction which exploded beneath public authorities 30 years later. It has also damaged private companies such as Next, which last year lost a tribunal case brought by 3,500 shop workers who complained that they were paid less than warehouse staff. But it is without question that Keir Starmer’s government is about to make things far worse through its Employment Rights Bill. The government preaches growth, yet simultaneously dreams up laws which make it more difficult to achieve. It is absolutely certain that the new Fair Work Agency will seek to justify its existence by trawling up more equal pay claims. Labour ministers may throw up their arms at our dysfunctional public services, but if they want them to work better they are going to have to stop handing munitions to the unions.
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