Victory. But let’s not take our eye off the ball now
there are many years of debt ahead for the authority. But it’s the council’s turn to worry about how to pay its bills. Dinner ladies, carers, lollipop ladies, cleaners, staff like these and all the families they support, they’ve struggled by long enough, earning less than men in comparable roles. That this was ever the case, in modern, progressive, egalitarian Scotland, makes the stomach curdle. And so many in positions of power or political influence could have spoken out and intervened over the years but were too busy pursuing their own agendas. Lawyer Stefan Cross, of Action 4 Equality Scotland, who represented thousands of women, told me: “My hope now is that the jobs the women do will finally get the value and pay they deserve.” And that, he says, will be an interesting challenge. So let’s not take our eye off the ball. Of course, the real credit in all this goes to the ordinary women who took the flack and made sacrifices and refused to accept institutionalised inequality at the nation’s largest local authority. When 8000 campaigners took to the streets in October to mount the UK’s biggest equal pay protest, critics (and there’s always some) were quick to hurl accusations of political game-playing, of union meddling. The women were having none of that. They were part of a global movement for change. This wasn’t about politics or unions – this was about equality. To all of them, Scotland is a fairer place because of what you did. Thank you.