One of the sectors we are looking at in our research project is local government, and in the UK Local Authorities (LAs) have played an interesting, often progressive, and sometimes contradictory and contested role in terms of equality in the workplace. The public sector has traditionally had a reputation as a good and fair employer, an impression dating back to the formation of the civil service in the mid-nineteenth century, and has played an important role in shaping employment opportunities for women. LAs have had a historical tendency to shape equalities work in trade unions, as well as being experiments for ‘municipal socialism’ and progressive ideas, dating back to the Webbs and the Fabians at the turn of the twentieth century, and including the Poplar rebels in the pre-war era; the Militant-led Liverpool Council and the Greater London Council in the 1980s; to the ‘Preston model’ today. The 1980s especially saw radical councils involved with the creation of specific units and initiatives to advance equality, such as free childcare provision for all staff, policies known as ‘municipal feminism’.
Despite this progressive history, and despite LAs actively addressing past gendered pay inequalities and developing pay equality policies which are already an advance on the Government’s Equalities Office recommendations, the public sector gender pay gap remains at 15.5% versus 9% in the private sector, with women working in the public sector earning 86p for every £1 of men, and in ‘shire’ districts only 35% of the top 5% of earners are women. This is especially notable in a context where almost three quarters of the LA workforce is women, in an overall workforce of 2.6 million employees.
Where is the gender pay gap?
There are 353 LAs in England, and while they are democratically elected bodies, they are restricted in their financial autonomy due to limits on how they can raise revenue. According to the OECD, every other G7 nation collected more taxes at a regional level than the UK (12%), such as Germany (30%) and Canada (50%). LAs receive revenue from three sources: council tax, business rates, and what is known as the ‘block grant’ from central Government. This income stream has been cut by 37% in real terms from 2009 to 2020, and due to statutory restrictions on LA finances, they are not able to borrow money to finance any of their day-to-day spending, which includes their wage bill.
There are some functional differences between LAs, with some ‘two-tier’ councils whereby services are divided between districts and counties, such as East Sussex; metropolitan district councils who pool services and authority across regions, such as Greater Manchester; and finally what is known as ‘unitary authorities’ which are responsible for the provision of all services within a specific area, such as Brighton and Hove. Analysis by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy shows that there is a wide variation in the gender pay gap not just between different types of authorities but also between authorities of the same type. They say that these differences can result from these structural variations, so if a large county council responsible for a rural and elderly population requires more social care workers, for example, which is traditionally a low-paid female workforce, this will directly affect the gap. Manchester City Council, for example, in their Pay Policy statement, write that their gender pay gap:
does not stem from paying men and women differently. Rather, it is the result of the roles in which men and women work within the organisation and the salaries that these roles attract…The proportion of low paid staff in the workforce (20% of the workforce – over 1500 employees – in Grades 1-3 roles) has a disproportionately high impact on the overall Gender Pay Gap [as] these roles are often part-time…Employment in these positions follows the national trend of being predominantly female and has a significant impact.
Interestingly, some LAs report a ‘negative’ gender pay gap, whereby women are paid more than men. At Three Rivers Council, for example, they directly attribute this to not outsourcing essential services, meaning that the large number of male refuse collectors directly employed are counter balanced with the many women they have in senior positions.
This indirectly acknowledges that the data on gender pay gap reporting is problematic as it obscures real inequalities that exist outside of the scope of the LA reporting mechanisms. As the Guardian reported in their analysis of the 2021 gender pay gap data, academy trusts are responsible for the biggest disparities: of the 50 organisations with the widest pay gaps – across either the private or the public sector – 18 of these were multi-academy trusts, which run academy schools. The ‘Learning for Life Partnership’, for example, which runs five schools in Cheshire, reported a gap of 77.2%, with women employees earning 23p for every £1 of their male colleagues. 80 academies had pay gaps of 50% or more.
Centralised pay-setting is associated with smaller intergroup differences, so when teachers and non-teaching staff are removed from these national and local collective agreements, then as has been seen in other outsourcing processes elsewhere, this will have a detrimental effect on workers’ terms and conditions.
The legal and political context of bargaining frameworks
Collective bargaining in LAs takes an institutionalised approach, characterised by Bach and Stroleny:
First, a strong collective dimension that operates through a single channel of union representation with extensive collective bargaining coverage. Secondly, a multi-tiered system combining national collective bargaining with local, authority based, joint consultation committees, dealing with the implementation of the national agreement and local issues. This tier has become more important as New Public Management reforms have fragmented public services and devolved responsibility; a trend reinforced under conditions of austerity. The third component comprises an increased role for direct forms of staff participation. Local authorities are independent employers but they are voluntarily covered by national-level pay bargaining – the national joint council (NJC) for local government services – that decides on pay and core national conditions whilst providing local authorities with considerable local flexibility (15).
The NJC, the negotiating body of local government, comprises of the Local Government Association which represents the employer side, and the three recognised trade unions – GMB, Unite, and Unison. LAs are covered by one collective agreement made by the NJC in 1997 known as the ‘green book’, which is the largest group for collective bargaining purposes in the UK, standing at 1.6 million employees. The ideological principle behind the formation of this national framework agreement was to reflect the notion of equal pay for equal work by amalgamating the ‘white book’, which was the terms and conditions of employment for manual workers, and the ‘purple book’, for administrative, technical, and professional workers. Before the green book, there was no way to be able to compare the ‘value’ of a job across the different categorisations, so the new agreement attempted to harmonise national conditions such as sick pay and annual leave whilst also allowing for local variations on issues such as bonuses and overtime arrangements. A Job Evaluation Scheme (JES) was to be conducted at local level, whereby each post would be assessed according to a variety of factors and required skills. Some have identified this stage of harmonisation as where discrimination either implicitly or explicitly occurs, as the qualities which are necessary for roles traditionally occupied by women are undervalued.
In 2007 the Gender Equality Duty (GED) was introduced, which placed a legal requirement on all public authorities to have ‘due regard’ to promote equality of opportunity between men and women, to eliminate discrimination, and to address the causes of any gender pay gap. However the Equality Act 2010, which replaced the GED duties, has no stipulations concerning equal pay, and additionally no longer includes a requirement for trade union (or other stakeholder) consultation. In practice this has meant that instead of a proactive approach towards addressing pay equality through negotiation and consultation, the process is reliant on a reactive response whereby equality can only be achieved after the discrimination has taken place. This has changed a fragile partnership-based collective bargaining framework to one which entails an individual response, and trade unions subsequently turned to litigation and lodged tens of thousands of equal pay tribunal claims.
A further contextual difficulty which hampered locally negotiated agreements was that LAs were not awarded any additional funding from central government to meet any negotiated wage increases or costs for retrospective settlements, an important factor when considering LAs revenue streams as discussed previously. Birmingham City Council, for example, has paid out £1.25 billion in equal pay settlements over the last decade, a financial situation which is not sustainable, especially given that LAs finances have been exacerbated further by austerity, which itself is highly gendered, due to the high number of women both employed by LAs and dependent on many of its services.
So what is to be done?
The local bargaining process of the JES attempted to eradicate pay inequality in LAs, yet the significance of the political and economic contextual factors as outlined above has meant that these attempts can be categorised as distributive bargaining of limited resources whereby one party may gain but at the other’s expense. In instances where bargaining has broken down and industrial action has taken place, this has often been as a defensive mechanism (to protect existing conditions) rather than as an offensive mechanism (to obtain improved conditions). Lower paid manual workers, predominantly male, have been threatened with cuts to pay to ‘harmonise’ wages with comparable ‘female’ roles, such as in the cases of the protracted refuse worker strikes at Leeds City Council in 2009 and Brighton & Hove City Council in 2013.
Equal pay should not be achieved through the proverbial race to the bottom, and Unison acknowledge that litigation alone will not solve the gender pay gap: “they benefit the individuals who have lodged equal pay claims but do not tackle the underlying causes of gender pay gaps,”. As my colleague has argued in her blog on equal pay in France here, equal pay is a systemic issue which requires more than organisations – whether at a local or national level – negotiating piecemeal changes to wage structures. There are complex, dynamic, and deeply rooted social causes for pay inequality which will require societal shifts and national state intervention to address wider social issues such as careers guidance in schools, training and education, enhanced childcare provision, and improvements and wider access to maternity and paternity pay and leave, among others.
Unison believe that a continuation of JES, conducted through negotiation and consultation, is the best way to establish where all roles fit into a fair and equitable structure. A mixture of “hard” HRM policies including specific policies on flexible working and recruitment, for example, and “soft” HRM practices like networking and mentoring opportunities are already more prevalent in unionised workplaces where negotiation and consultation with unions on equality occurs, yet this strategic commitment to equality can be difficult to maintain in a context of discontinuity and change in addition to a broader hostile political climate. But as has been demonstrated before through historical attempts at ‘municipal feminism’, a lot can be achieved if there is the political will and opportunity structures to do so. LAs will continue to be a fascinating and important site in which to look at equalities at work.