This is one of those things where I assume it can't be as bad as it sounds. I skimmed through 5 or 6 articles on the strike and only one of them mentioned the details of the equal pay ruling in 2012. If you just looked at the current articles, you'd never know the underlying issue.
So then I asked GPT4o for some context. The city is forced to deal with the costs and have tried to find reasonable solutions but the union is understandably not into the removal of higher paying roles and cuts to wages down the line for people that take those affected positions. The roles that are in question (bin men, street cleaning, parks - all outdoor jobs AFAIK) were deemed to receive higher than market compensation during that equal pay case due to union negotiated bonuses and regular OT hours. Those rates were hard to reduce as you would expect. I couldn't find any real hard evidence of the magnitude of all of this but it sounds like par for the course for long standing union jobs like this.
I did some more digging though and the real meat is the 2012 case which hinged on the legal principal of "equal value". According to 4o:
Legal Foundation:
Under the UK’s Equal Pay Act 1970 (and later the Equality Act 2010), women and men are entitled to equal pay for:
Like work (same or broadly similar),
Work rated as equivalent, or
Work of equal value—even if the jobs are different, so long as they require comparable effort, skill, and responsibility.
What “Equal Value” Meant in This Case:
The women bringing the case—clerical, care, cleaning, and catering staff—argued that their work, though different in nature, required:
Comparable levels of skill and decision-making,
Similar responsibility and effort,
And that their roles contributed equally to the functioning of the council.
The tribunal agreed, finding that the systematic undervaluation of traditionally female roles, particularly through lack of access to bonuses and enhancements, violated the principle of equal value.
Key Implications:
The tribunal rejected the argument that physical hardship or market tradition justified pay differences on their own.
It emphasized that job evaluation studies—not tradition or union negotiations—must guide pay parity.
It also showed that indirect discrimination can occur even in the absence of explicit exclusion or bias, through structures that consistently reward one gender over another.
It's noted that the female-dominated roles include more flexible hours, less physically demanding work, less exposure to the weather, later start times and shorter expected working hours. But those things would not be taken into consideration, except that those are factors that made those roles more appealing to women and that these differences in working conditions are part of the reason for the gender divide. In other words: the higher paid jobs are harder, lower status, less flexible. That means they have to pay more and they are more likely to be held by men. And because the easier, more flexible roles are filled by more women, but the "value" they create is the same, they must be paid the same amount.
I'm sure those male-dominate roles are overpaid to some degree due to the union doing what unions do. fair. But they don't seem to care about the real reasons for the pay difference. It's wild.
I'm genuinely curious about a projected 2-3% inflation when imports are all increased in cost by >10%, and that includes a lot of input costs for domestic goods. It doesn't pass the sniff test. I'm open to being educated about it though.
p
This is one of those things where I assume it can't be as bad as it sounds. I skimmed through 5 or 6 articles on the strike and only one of them mentioned the details of the equal pay ruling in 2012. If you just looked at the current articles, you'd never know the underlying issue.
So then I asked GPT4o for some context. The city is forced to deal with the costs and have tried to find reasonable solutions but the union is understandably not into the removal of higher paying roles and cuts to wages down the line for people that take those affected positions. The roles that are in question (bin men, street cleaning, parks - all outdoor jobs AFAIK) were deemed to receive higher than market compensation during that equal pay case due to union negotiated bonuses and regular OT hours. Those rates were hard to reduce as you would expect. I couldn't find any real hard evidence of the magnitude of all of this but it sounds like par for the course for long standing union jobs like this.
I did some more digging though and the real meat is the 2012 case which hinged on the legal principal of "equal value". According to 4o:
It's noted that the female-dominated roles include more flexible hours, less physically demanding work, less exposure to the weather, later start times and shorter expected working hours. But those things would not be taken into consideration, except that those are factors that made those roles more appealing to women and that these differences in working conditions are part of the reason for the gender divide. In other words: the higher paid jobs are harder, lower status, less flexible. That means they have to pay more and they are more likely to be held by men. And because the easier, more flexible roles are filled by more women, but the "value" they create is the same, they must be paid the same amount.
I'm sure those male-dominate roles are overpaid to some degree due to the union doing what unions do. fair. But they don't seem to care about the real reasons for the pay difference. It's wild.
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