THE EQUAL PAY FRAUD

A progress report on that traditional 'good cause', equal pay, has revealed that women workers are still far from obtaining a living wage.

Prepared by the Office of Manpower Economics (successor to the Prices and Incomes Board), it shows that the steps towards equal pay are uneven throughout industry despite the promise by the government to make the principle compulsory by December 1975.

Almost half a million women workers are still earning 80 per cent less than male rates more than two years after the Equal Pay Act reached the statute books. The report concludes that progress manual jobs is particularly slow and especially bad in small companies.

In agreements covering oneninth of female manual workers there are no moves towards equal pay. At company level, two-fifths have taken no action to introduce it nor have any plans to do so.

A survey of 200 smaller companies with less than 100 employees showed that only four were found to have laid any plans for equal pay-and these are, of course, the small back street operators who sweat their female workers the most.

This news will mean another campaign by the unions to get the Tories to agree to some statutory interim stage by which temale pay rates must reach a certain level of male earnings.

This kind pleading however main issue.

The TUC has been passing pious resolutions on the vicious exploitation of female workers since 1888—about 45 are recorded in the Congress minutes.

The campaign, however, was reborn in 1968 when the Ford sewing machine workers came out on strike and demanded equal pay. Their dispute hit the headlines and held up £50m worth of exports.

Since that date the employers have attempted sidetrack the issue.

One of the favourite weapons is to argue for equal pay for 'work of equal value' This allows all sorts of subjective considerations — the quality of a woman's work, the operators' strength, time off work due to domestic demands etc., etc. It employers were allowed to bring in these considerations, many women, of course, would find themselves little better off.

Another trick is to suggest that men and women workers are opposed to each other and that the 'greedy' men should take a wage-cut to help their sisters (a variation on the low paid versus high-paid worker Some employers' representatives are quite blatant about this. For example J. C. Butler, secretary of the Retail Consortum, warned: In certain cases where there is a differing rate of pay between the sexes and mostly women are employed, the men's pay will have to be reduced.' This kind of pressure has often worked to the detriment of both men and women workers, particularly in the retail and distribution indusbers: 'You will not be marchequal pay row in 1969 the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers got its membership to accept a low pay award because of the concession on equal pay.

In fact the amount awarded to the workers, male and female, was 25 to 50 per cent BELOW the original demand of £l for men and £2 for women. The 'palliative' was the Is extra awarded to female shop assistants.

The other manoeuvre used by the employers is to slip in job evaluation and MeasuredDay Work in the guise of a bid to establish a plan for equal pay. Employers argue that job-evaluation is necessary to assess whether women are doing work of equal value. The result, in fact, is speedmore productivity and redundancies for all sections of the labour force.

The whole question of 'equal pay' can be a trap for workers that the trade union leaders have already fallen Capitalism does not particularly discriminate against workers because of their sex. Rather it uses women's weak bargaining power to create a pool of cheap labour that threatens all wage rates.

This is revealed by the employers' determined opposition to a minimum wage. This, of course, would cut right across their plans of tricking women workers into accepting less pay because they are not doing 'work of equal value'— they would have to pay up, no arguments.