Just published. The ideologically-driven madness of equal pay for unequal work has driven the largest local authority in the country into bankruptcy.
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As the equivalent value measure is driven by by comparisons between parts of the same firm or organisation where there are occupations “predominantly female” to compare to those “predominantly male”. Though there have in fact been successful counter claims by groups of Male workers in Councils. Generally of course the move is to upgrade the pay of females. The logic of this is to ensure that either there are no “predominantly female” occupations/sections in your company (and my impression is that there are more and more “shop floor” males as the purely “check out” jobs are phased out in local supermarkets) or as I say outsource to companies that are mainly Male or female. On this latter point there is often filming locally (we live near “Media city”) and it is striking that all the technical crew, security, scaffolders, decorators, drivers etc are white men. Whereas the “talent” and TV company staff(running about with clipboards) are “diverse. Filming in two location nearby and on our road shows one reason why, the weather was awful and the men had wet time of it. However no doubt the “show had to go on” and while the talent and clipboard girls hid in gazebos the blokes just got wet. It is also noticeable in both the local Aldis and Lidles the staff are much more “Male” than in Tesco’s and Asda, I suspect because the former “low cost” supermarkets expect their staff to do the full range of jobs rather than the specialising one sees in the larger supermarkets. I noticed that in reports currently over a third of Asdas shopfloor staff are Male, and one does wonder if this is being actively increased both to challenge “predominantly female” and mirror the more versatile staff in the Aldi/Lidle model. IE people who can go from tills to stacking to merchandising to offloading deliveries and so on.
Thanks Groan, agreed. This reminds me of the nonsense that check-out operators do work of equivalent “value” to warehouse operators, an insult to the latter. Supermarkets have responded as we’d expect, by reducing the number of checkout operators and increasing the number of self-service tills. Women’s greed has backfired on them. Good.
Yup. Glasgow, the largest in Scotland, is teetering on the brink for the same reason. A little known fact is that this drove the outsourcing of council services. For although HR consultancy firms may judge jobs as “equivalent value” the labour market is really driven by supply and demand. So generally there is no difficulty recruiting into homecare or admin. and the former in particular was easy to outsource. Whereas dirty, outdoor in all weathers or dangerous jobs are difficult to recruit to, so these too were outsourced (where the pay is then a matter for the company). Of course labour councils for ideological reasons were slower to outsource or didn’t and hence they will be hit hardest. In effect those councils are paying the price of remaining direct employers of a large and “diverse” workforce.