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International Socialism, February 1973

Margaret Renn

Briefing:
Equal Pay

From International Socialism, No.55, February 1973, pp.9-11.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

The Equal Pay Act [1] became law in 1970. The TUC had first raised the issue in 1888, 82 years previously. If anything, the Second World War probably achieved more for women workers than the TUC, when some groups of women, such as bus conductresses, got equal pay. The Government introduced equal pay for non-manual civil servants in 1955 and subsequently for non-manual workers in local government, nationalised industries, the health service and teaching. Further progress, at Government level, depended mainly on entry into the Common Market, for which negotiations took place during the sixties. Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome specified that women should receive ‘equal remuneration for the same work’, a rather narrow view of equal pay, but one reflected in the legislation finally introduced in 1970. This was far from the International Labour Organisation convention which called for ‘equal remuneration for work of equal value’, a view for which the unions had argued but lost.

The Equal Pay Act provides for equal pay for women who do the same, or broadly similar work as men, i.e. with no differences of ‘practical importance’, or when employed on work which has been given an equal value under a job evaluation scheme. There is no requirement for employers to introduce such schemes, and job evaluation can be designed to discriminate against women anyway. Nor are there any sanctions under the law to compel the employers to introduce equal pay for any women – a case law will have to be built up after 1975 to ensure that.

The Act deals only with pay directly, but not what are normally called ‘fringe benefits’, such as conditions relating to pregnancy, hours of work, retirement or pensions, which leaves a large gap in the Act, as it is particularly in these areas that women suffer most.

Women comprise 38 per cent of the total work force, 8.5 million out of 22 million, and of these over 80 per cent work full time, and over 60 per cent are married. Women work on average for 35 years as compared to 50 for men; the 15 years difference being accounted for by five years earlier retirement and 10 years at home child-rearing. The number of women going out to work increased by 1.5 million between 1951 and 1971, and yet the total work force has only increased by just over that figure during the same period.

Actual earnings for women in no way compare favourably with those of men (Table 1). Average weekly earnings for manual women workers are only 51 per cent of those for men, although basic rates are on average about 80 per cent of men’s. It is the basic rates that the Equal Pay Act could do most to change.
 

Types of Work

The recent report of the Office of Manpower Economics [2] says:

‘Of the manual workers, relatively few women are to be found in industries where pay for men is high; conversely in industries where most women are concentrated the pay for men tends to be low ... In the non-manual sector women are more strongly represented in industries where men’s earnings are high (e.g. insurance, banking, professional and scientific services)’.

Altogether ²/3 of women workers are in the growing service sector, and over half are in three major service groups:

Less than one-third, 2.6 million, are in manufacturing, in particular: food, drink, tobacco, engineering (especially electrical engineering), textiles, clothing and footwear. A more general guideline for the extent of the differential is the fact that 87 per cent of all women manual workers earn less than £20, and 87 per cent of male manual workers earn more than £20, (though not necessarily very much more).

The report covered 5 million out of 8.5 million working women, and was intended to assist the Government in deciding whether or not to introduce an order compelling employers to bring women up to 90 per cent of men’s rates by the end of 1973, provision for which had been made in the Act. It showed that the relative earnings of men and women are directly (but disproportionately) affected by differences in the hours worked – women working on average 84 per cent of the hours men work.
 

Hours and Shift Work

The average hours worked by manual workers: men, 45 hours, women, 38½ hours. The average hours worked by non-manual workers: men, 39, women, 37 hours. Women generally work less because they have less opportunity (and possibly less inclination) to work overtime; they are more likely to have time off, particularly for family commitments; they do less shift work. This last fact is controlled to some extent by the existence of the Factories Act (Table 2).

The Factories Act restricts the hours worked by women workers to 48 hours a week, to be worked after 7 a.m. and before 8 p.m. or 1 p.m. on Saturdays. The Act itself refers specifically to double day shifts where the limits can be extended to 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. Women are excluded from all forms of ‘round the clock’ shift systems, although special (long) hours can apply in laundries and bakeries.

The Minister of Employment may grant any exemptions if ‘it is desirable in the public interest do so for the purposes of maintaining or increasing the efficiency of industry or transport,’ and it is this which is increasingly being used as an argument by the employers to withdraw the restrictions.

Over the past few years the total number of exemptions and renewal of exemptions has increased, while the number of prosecutions has dropped to almost nothing – 32 in 1966. In 1969 the Department of Employment and Productivity (DEP) produced a report [3] to coincide with the discussions on equal pay. In the foreword. Barbara Castle, then Secretary of State for Employment, and responsible for the Equal Pay legislation, said:

‘There is a long history to legal restrictions on the hours that women and young people work in factories. But the appalling social and industrial conditions which produced them are happily a thing of the past (sic). Is there, then, any longer a need for these restrictions? And if not, to what extent are they standing in the way of higher productivity and greater industrial efficiency?’

Happily, the working party that produced the report could not agree on whether the law should be changed so that women could work nights etc., and nothing has, as yet, been changed. But it must be remembered that the legislation only covers women in factories, and the only other protective legislation which exists covers women in shops, mines and quarries. Women who work in offices, in transport, canteens, cleaning, hospitals and agriculture – a majority of working women – are not protected.
 

Job Opportunity

In 1963 the TUC approved a six point Charter of Trade Union Aims for Women Workers, of which three related to the training of women. It was recognised, even then, that unless job opportunity could be improved for women they would continue to be among the lowest paid, even if and when equal pay was achieved. Equal pay cannot be discussed without assessing the job opportunities that are open to women.

In 1964 the passing of the Industrial Training Act raised the hope that something would be done towards remedying the situation. But its impact has been negligible up to the present time, and there are now moves to ditch it altogether. The sort of discrimination which results in differences in job opportunity start early in the education system; the aspirations social attitudes and expectations of women are not formally instilled, but reflect a real situation. Fewer girls stay at school after the statutory school leaving age; fewer girls take ‘A’ levels; fewer go to university. Girls are far less ‘career minded’ mainly because of the expected break which will occur in their working lives when they marry and stay home to have children. (For this they are constantly penalised, particularly by the employers.)

Even at work, formal training benefits boys more than girls. Forty-two per cent of boys and 7 per cent of girls enter apprenticeships, and most of these in hairdressing. Nearly 40 per cent of boys and 10.4 per cent of girls get day release – those industries which employ the largest proportions of women are those with the lowest proportion of women receiving day release, e.g. clothing and footwear, the distributive trade, textiles, insurance and banking, printing and publishing. And the one occupation undertaken mainly by women – typing, shorthand and secretarial work – is still not recognised as requiring an industrial apprenticeship; most women have to acquire such skills themselves. [4]

The hopes placed in the Industrial Training Act to change this situation were soon dashed. Two thirds of clerical workers are women, but the Commercial and Clerical Training Committee ceased to function in 1969. Three quarters of hairdressers are women, but the Hairdressing and Allied ITB was abolished almost as soon as it was formed. Of the other ITBs the overwhelming majority of programmes are for men.

The Government’s recent document Training for the Future suggests that the levy/grant system, to which employers are obliged to contribute, should be abolished and replaced by an advisory service. This will be of no benefit to workers at all.
 

The TUC

The TUC has naturally argued against this, but it has not on this, or on any of the other issues related to equal pay – nor even equal pay itself – made any real challenge to the Government. There have been more resolutions passed by the major unions in the past year than ever before, but the OME study claims that

‘in about one in 10 companies, it was contended by managements that its introduction had been blocked by the attitudes of the male union members.’

The TUC says in its pamphlet Your Job and the Equal Pay Act [5] that the

‘trade unions believe that a man whose work is equal in value to another man’s should be paid equally for it. And if a woman’s work is equal in value to a man’s, she too should be paid as much for it.’

However, the pamphlet gives very little practical guidance to women fighting for equal pay, other than suggesting that they ‘Cannot do better than stick close to their union.’ It is hardly a clarion call to action. It is a fact that one in four women are in unions as compared to one in two men, and that while constituing 30 per cent of the labour force only makes up 24 per cent of the total membership of the unions in the TUC. The number of women officials is notoriously small compared to the number of men.
 

International Comparisons

Britain is the only one of the major countries studied by the OME report that has specific legislation relating to equal pay. In other countries the relevant regulations either form a part of general labour legislation, or are written into the constitution.

In Europe generally (table 3) women fare better than in Britain, but in the United States they don’t seem to have done so well. The US Equal Pay Act of 1963 has had little impact on the earnings of women relative to those of men, and if anything the percentage was higher before the Act was passed. In Sweden there is no legislation; the moves towards equal pay being agreed between the employers and the unions, and (in manufacturing industries at least) they get a better deal than any other group of women. West Germany has legally had equal pay since 1955, but the practice of turning what used to be men’s rates and women’s rates into rates for physically heavy or light work is widespread. This is the problem with all legislation which provides for equal pay for the ‘same work’, and will be a problem in Britain.

The most common factor which discriminates against women in all the countries is their concentration into ‘lower paid’ and ‘lower skilled’ jobs – many of which have become traditionally female jobs. Minimum wage legislation would help.

The point of the OME study was to establish whether or not at the present rate of progress, full equal pay will have been achieved by December 1975 and whether as an interim measure women’s rates are likely to be about 90 per cent by December 1973. It found that percentage increases in earnings between 1970 and 1971 were slightly better for women than men, but at the same time the actual cash gap widened; of the companies examined, covering five million women, one fifth had introduced equal pay for either manual or white collar workers, whilst only one tenth had intrdoduced it for both. (Generally, slightly more progress had been made for white collar workers.) Ignorance of the Act was widespread, particularly in the smaller companies, where trade union organisation is weakest; some companies were deliberately organising to evade the Act, particularly by moving women out of jobs, so that they were no longer comparable.

The Equal Pay Act has raised the issue, and promises a lot, but without concerted pressure from the unions it could turn out to be a disaster for women workers.

Notes

1. The Equal Pay Act 1970 – HMSO

2. The Office of Manpower Economics: Report on Equal Pay, 1972 – HMSO

3. Department of Employment and Productivity: Report on the Hours of Employment of Women and Young Persons employed in Factories, HMSO

4. For further discussion and information see the Special Report to the TUC Womens Conference, 1972 – The Roots of Inequality, TUC – 1972

5. Your Job and The Equal Pay Act – TUC

 
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