Equal pay row could have cost a fraction of £550m bill
GLASGOW’S equal-pay battle could have been resolved for a fraction of the £550million the local authority eventually agreed to under the terms of a potential settlement offer put forward nearly three years ago, our sister publication, the Herald on Sunday has revealed.
Stefan Cross, of Action 4 Equality Scotland, which represents the majority of the 16,000 mainly female workers who secured the mammoth settlement in January, said he approached the council in June 2016 with the intention of bringing an end to the long-running dispute.
“We had a short meeting with [then council leader] Frank McAveety and [HR director] Robert Anderson to discuss the possibility of resolving these matters,” he said.
“The basis was that if they paid our clients what we thought they were entitled to under payment protection we would end the legal proceedings.
“Our estimate was that it would be about £70m but we would have to verify the figures as we hadn’t seen the pay data.
“That was the nature of the discussion; it was us making a presentation trying to break the log-jam and them not responding at all. We didn’t succeed – thank god for that.”
At that time, the council had won an employment tribunal case saying that a job evaluation process it had completed a decade previously was sound. An appeals tribunal, however, had ruled that its practice of protecting bonuses that had previously been earned by male staff only was discriminatory.
While the women were appealing the first decision and the council the second, Mr Cross said he would have been willing to draw a line under all proceedings to settle the payment protection part only.
“Statistically, there’s only a 10 per cent chance of overturning a tribunal decision so we knew there was a massive risk that we would lose the appeal – it was much more likely that we would lose than we would win,” he said.
Mr McAveety and Glasgow City Council both confirmed that the informal and unminuted meeting with Action 4 Equality took place, although they denied that the £70m figure had been discussed.
“This did not happen,” a council spokesman said. “Representatives of Action4Equality restated their position that the council should stop defending equal-pay claims.
“However, officers are clear that no offer was made and that figure was not put to the council.”