Equal pay deal ‘also included legal fees’

● Glasgow women council workers ‘haven’t won as much as promised’

The women who fought Glasgow City Council for equal pay have had money deducted to pay legal fees despite pledges from their unions, a documentary has revealed.

Members of Unison, Unite and the GMB were told they would get 100 per cent of the council’s settlement money. However, a documentary, shown on BBC One Scotland last night, mentions documents showing “all claimants” have had fees deducted.

Disclosure: The Great Equal Pay Scandal investigated the long-running dispute which saw women being paid less than men in jobs of the same grade. The issue was settled in January, when Glasgow City Council agreed to pay out a reported £548 million to compensate the women for the money they should have been paid – in many cases going back to 2007 when the new job evaluation scheme was adopted.

The scheme was supposed to ensure that men and women received equal pay for jobs of the same value. But instead, some traditionally female-dominated roles such as catering or home care ended up being paid up to £3 an hour less than male-dominated jobs such as refuse workers or gardeners.

Most of the 16,000 claimants were represented by private claims company Action 4 Equality, run by lawyer Stefan Cross.

Employment lawyer Carol Fox, who worked with Mr Cross on the Glasgow case between 2008 and 2015, said that the unions only began to put claims in for the women when they saw the success of claims companies, who were taking on councils and winning. By the time of the settlement with Glasgow, Unison had dealt with 5,000 claims, while the GMB had more than 2,500 and Unite had a small number of claims.

All the unions had promised members they would get all the money they were owed. However, Disclosure found that the three unions – as well as Action 4 Equality – entered into a deal before negotiations began with the council. As part of this, it was agreed that every claimant would have a percentage of the settlement offered by the council deducted in legal fees. This included those backed by their unions.

Stefan Cross said 6.9 per cent was deducted from “all the claimants”, with a proportion being paid to his company, Action 4 Equality. However, it is believed that none of the claimants represented by their unions were told they would be paying fees.

He said: “The unions’ proposal was that we had to agree parity to start with. The cost is that fees had to be paid somehow. This is the most fair, most beneficial way for everybody that we did it on that basis.

“Every single agreement includes a legal commitment to make that payment.”

As well as the legal fees, Disclosure also discovered that potentially thousands of workers have missed out on claiming for the full extent of their discrimination.

According to Mr Cross, thousands of claims were lodged too late. However, the unions deny this.