Equal pay victory will mean a big increase in further claims
August 1, 2008
This week the outcome of a Court of Appeal case has opened the door to thousands of potential equal pay claims for women working in local authorities across the country. Women working for local councils in the North East had been battling for four years to claim for years of bonuses they should have been entitled to when their male co-workers received them.
This situation came about with schemes introduced in the 1990s to try to resolve the differences in pay between male and female local authority workers. Male workers would have received a drop in pay as a result, so they were given payment protections which meant their salaries were topped up to lessen the blow of the equal pay schemes. The women in the ‘landmark’ case have successfully argued that this simply reinforced the disparity in pay rather than resolve it. The councils tried to argue that this was a practical, and therefore lawful way of dealing with the situation, but failed and will now have to pay out large sums of money.
This will pave the way for many more claims of this kind, and there is now the fear that this will add more pressure to the legal system which has already been dealing with 44,000 equal pay claims in the last year.
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