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The ostensible purpose of the TUC conference on equal pay in January, the first since 1968, was to discuss the recent report by the Office of Manpower Economics on the progress (and nonprogress) towards equal pay, and for those directly involved in negotiating it to discuss the problems they had encountered. The unions were asked by the TUC's women's advisory committee to appoint delegates, and many sent full-time officiers. One or two even sent their general secretary. The inevitable result was a virtual white wash of the miserable performance of practically every union on the equal pay question. As one delegate, a woman deputy convenor from a large electronics factory, said to a reporter: "How could I criticise my union when the executive asked me to come here. They would never ask me to go anywhere again."
What really threw the conference off course was the frozen hand of the State. The Secretary of State for Employment had been invited to address the delegates, and the women's advisory committee had been hoping that he would announce his intention of using his powers under the Equal Pay Act to issue an order requiring women's rates to be brought up to 90 per cent of men's by the end of this year. Much of the energy of the TUC bureaucrats has been spent putting pressure on the Government to implement this clause.
Instead, Macmillan came along to announce what the Government had in mind for women workers under the second stage of its wage freeze In order to encourage a "more orderly progression' towards equal pay, it would allow (not require) a reduction of the gap between men's and women's rates by one • third in 1973. And Macmillan generously indicated that the £1 plus 4 per cent pay limit "could additionally be used to improve the wages of many low paid women in industry." Chairwoman Audrey Prime, of NALGO, had earlier warned the delegates that they must treat the minister with the respect and decorum the TUC traditionally accords to all its speakers, and after his statement she led the applause. Sadly, many of the delegates joined in.
Neither the minister nor the TV cameras stayed to hear the next speaker, Christine Page, of USDAW, who said that she was sickened that he should have been allowed to address the conference at all, and to hear him say he was trying to help women towards equal pay when he had, for example, prevented women laundry workers receiving an additional 50p on a wage of £12.20 a week under the freeze.
Other speakers proceeded to unpack the package deal. Beryl Huffingley, of the TWU, pointed out that the Government was saying: " *Divide the cake among yourselves. You women could have 3 per cent and the men 1 per cent?. But we are not going to fight your battles for you. We have always said we want a levelling up not a leveling down, and this is another example of that policy. We have got to go on the offensive." But the only action proposed by the delegates, principally by those who belong to the Communist Party, was to call on the TUC General Council to hold a special congress to step up the fight against the freeze. It was not necessary, of course, to recall the TUC to release the Pentonville 5, but none of the delegates suggested the organisation of independent action by And while the few women militants at the conference are fighting difficult struggles in their factories and workplaces for equal pay, often against almost as much resistance from the union bureaucrats as from management, no one put forward a strategy for mobilising or even educating rank and file women workers on the issue. Even the TUC's pathetic guide to the Act has received very limited distribution. There is still widespread fear among women workers that if their rates (not to mention their earnings) are ever brought in line with the men's they will be squeezed out of a job. As Sylvia Sabin, a shop steward in the GMWU, put it: *I speak to girls wherever 1 go-in grocery shops, Marks and Spencer, my bank, my insurance lady, and I'm trying to get round to see all the chambermaids in the hotel I'm staying at today. They're so afraid, because of their financial committments, that somehow equal pay will cheat them out of something. No shop steward worth her salt would allow this to happen, but what will happen when these jobs go vacant?"
Relying on the Act would clearly be a policy of defeat. Quite apart from the fact that it is no substitute for struggle, its deficiences are already making themselves apparent. The distiction between rates and carnings, for example, is crucial, a point which Charles Donnet, the GMWU's national officer for local government services, drove home at the conference: "We have sought to overcome the low pay situation in the local government sector by introducing a minimum earnings guarantee, so that men on a basic rate of £17.45 with no opportunity of increasing it by overtime or bonus earnings would have their carings made up to £19 a week. "But this opportunity was deliberately denied to women. When we sought to have it applied to them, the management told us the Equal Pay Act applied to basic rates, not earnings." Donnet didn't say that he suggested to his membership that they might care to reply to the management with their feet and low pay itself-which characterises the situation of women practically and the services— was scarcely mentioned at the conference. According to the latest Government figures for the year ending April 1972, the average weekly earnings of full-time women manual workers were £16.6 compared with £32.1 for men.
Another key question is job evaluation schemes, by which under the terms of the Act, women can claim equal rates if their job has been given an equal value in an evaluation study. Where women are doing different jobs from men, as they frequently do, such schemes offer their main opportunity of benefiting from the Act, but as Betty Crawford, of the AUEW, correctly stated: " "Evaulation", according to the dictionary, means to find the true value. Value to whom, the workers or the bosses? How many union officers are involved in the practical application of schemes they recommend to their members? The employers introduce job evaulation because they hope to reduce their costs, control wage payment, and get round equal pay hy ranking the job that women do at the bottom of the pile. And for the unions it avoids action." Action is precisely what the unions have managed to avoid, and conference of this kind do nothing to inform the rank and file of what the employers and the State have in store for them.