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Two members of the women's liberation movement in Aberdeen have been researching the first year of the Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts in Scotland. They will shortly be producing a pamphlet on this subject. Jane Saren spoke to Maggie Marshall, one of the authors, about their findings.
JS: What made you decide to do this research? MM: Last autumn we approached the Tribunals office in Aberdeen to find out how many cases had been brought under the EPA and SDA in the Grampian Region, simply out of interest. We discovered that only 6 cases had been brought, and of these, not one had been successful.
This made us wonder about the conduct of the Tribunals, so we had a glance at the transcripts of some of them, It seemed very much that the Acts were being interpreted in an extremely finicky way, and that women were being treated unfairly. We felt that this should be publicised. Since so few cases had been brought, and also to give us a better basis for judgement, we decided to cover the whole of Scotland.
We got in touch with all the women who had brought cases in the Grampian Region and their representatives at the Tribunals. We also contacted as many as possible outside the area, and we got copies of the proceedings of all the Tribunals in Scotland and studied cases which were taken to the Employment Tribunals Appeals body in Glasgow,
In addition to his, we surveyed the general cconomic position of women in Scotland for the pamphlet.
JS: How many EPA and SDA cases have been
fought in Scotland as a whole, and how many have been successful!
MM: Up to the end of March 1977, 39
EPA cases were contested, of which 14 were
decided in the woman's favour; there have
been 7 SDA cases of which 1 was successful
As far as we know, the SDA cases have all been concerned with discrimination in employment, and have thus gone to
Tribunals we don't know of any having
been fought on the grounds of discrimination
in education or provision of goods and services, which would be heard in the Sheriff Court.
JS: Why do you think so many cases have been lost?
MM: There are lost of reasons Firstly, the Tribunals started off with no guidelines to the operation of the Acts, and they have
taken a very narrow view in their application
of them e.g. as to what constitutes broadly similar work?. A woman who worked in
a stalf canteen in Dumbarton, making snacks
and going errands, claimed she was entitled to equal pay with the tea-boys in the same firm who cooked meals for staff who
didn't use the canteen: they earned t51 per
week, and occasionally got overtime for working Sundays, which she didn't have the option of doing, whereas she earned $33.70 per week.
The Tribunal ruled that this was not like work, since she made snacks while the men cooked meals in fact, they all cooked things like bacon and eggs, but she put them into rolls as well! The Tribunal also said that even had "broadly similar' work been established, she would not have
been entitied to the same pay because there
were material differences in their work, since she had staff status and was paid on
i weekly basis, while the tea-boys were casual workers and were paid at an hourly
Tate.
This particular case also illustrates another problem in the operation of the Acts. On appeal, a very similar case in England was decided in the woman's favour. But only the decisions of the Scottish appeals board in Glasgow set legal precedents for the Scottish Tribunals. And Tribunal decisions, as opposed to appeals decisions, aren't binding on subsequent Tribunals, English or Scottish, at all.
A major loophole in the Equal Pay Act. itself is that, unlike most other tribunals. such as for Unfair Dismissal, the onus is on the complainant to prove her/his case. Even if they can prove that they are doing "broudly similar work to that of the person with whom the claim equal pay, the employer can then plead "material differences" in the nature of the jobs.
To give an example of what has been accepted as a material difference, in one case a woman who was a cleaner on a construction site neur Peterhead claimed equal pay with a man who worked beside
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her. The Tribunal accepted the employers" argument of a material difference in their duties because the man occasionally drove
into Peterhead to get messages -but the
woman also had a driving licence, and was willing to go on errands. She had never been asked to.
Generally, employers have gone to a surprising amount of trouble to circumvent the operation of the Acts, even where only one or two of their employees would have been affected. JS: Most of the cases in Scotland seem to have been brought by isolated individuals, rather than by groups of women. How much support have they got from their trade unions in their action? MM: Yet, most of the Scottish cases have been brought by individual women, and there must be many more who do not claim because they are intimated by the procedure. Even the women we contacted who had fought cases were not fully informed of the workings of the Tribunals, or fully aware of their right of appeal. The majority of women who have fought cases in Scotland have been represented by their union at the Tribunal. I myself am not sure if more could have been done by the unions, but I think it's fair to say that the women we got in touch with felt their unions could have been more supportive. JS: What impact do you feel the Acts have made on the position of women in Scotland?
MM: There is still a large gap between the average wages of men and women: in April, 1976 the average weekly wage for a man doing manual work was £66.20, for a woman in manual work it was C39.40 (gross). The five-year waiting period between the passing of the Equal Pay Act and its coming into effect allowed employers to re-evaluate jobs and put women in separate categories.
Quite apart from that, women tend to be employed specifically in certain industries and services, and the Equal Pay Act is useless to women who cannot compare their job with that done by a man.
But obviously women won't win equal rights from a tribunal - the women in the Trico factory showed that what's needed is for women to organise and fight for their rights.