ALL jobs must be open to f lexible working, says equality watchdog

EVERY job should be opened to part-time working, according to the Government equality agency. Even the most demanding and highest-paid roles should be advertised as available for flexible working, the Equality and Human Rights Commission said.

It called for laws giving everyone who takes a new job the right to demand parttime working unless the employer shows a genuine business reason why not.

Yesterday an economist accused the commission of coming up with ideas that would make running a business impossible, while a Tory MP accused it of nanny-state nonsense.

The commission made its call as part of a string of demands for measures to reduce the gender pay gap and other differences in pay rates which it said affect ethnic minority staff and the disabled.

It said men should be encouraged to care for children while women are given the opportunity to be engineers and construction workers, and that ministers should set a target to press employers to give half of all senior management and executive jobs to women.

Schools should encourage boys to consider qualifications and careers in occupations stereotypically viewed as ‘female’ such as childcare and caring. Employers should report on pay by ethnicity and disability as well as gender.

The demands come at a time when the gender pay gap has shrunk by nearly two-thirds since the early 1990s and has almost entirely disappeared for women under the age of 40.

The commission also acknowledged that most ethnic minority women workers earn more than white women. Deputy chairman Caroline Waters said: ‘We need to overhaul our culture and make flexible working the norm; looking beyond women as the primary caregivers and having tough conversations about the biases that are rife in our workforce and society.’

The commission said in a report that part-time hours, job sharing and other flexible working schemes should be available at all levels of organisations and for the highest-paid jobs.

It called for a new form of ‘use it or lose it’ paternity leave offered for fathers to persuade them to ask for flexible working and to ‘reduce the motherhood penalty that many women face after having children’.

Tory MP Philip Davies, a member of the Commons women and equalities committee, accused the commission of peddling ‘Left-wing claptrap’. He said: ‘This is nannystate nonsense. They need to get out and visit the real world.

‘When these people came before our committee they didn’t even know about the pay gaps in their own organisation.’ In 2010 the commission was found to be paying 9.66 per cent more to white staff than to ethnic minority staff; 8.9 per cent more to able-bodied than disabled employees; and 3.04 per cent more to men than women.

Economist Ruth Lea, of the Arbuthnot Banking Group, said ‘we all condemn discrimination’, but added: ‘One has to ask how many of these people have ever tried to run their own business.

‘What they are asking is entirely unrealistic and would scupper any business before a day was out. It would make running a business impossible.’