Extending “work of equal value” claims is absurd

In its closing chapter, Keir Starmer’s administration chose to indulge in one of the Left’s worst instincts. The extension of “work of equal value” claims beyond sex to include race and disability, announced last week, has been presented as another step towards equality. In truth, it reflects the modern Left’s obsession with equity of outcomes over equality of opportunity. 

Equal opportunity is rooted in the law treating us all equally, with legal protections to ensure we are free from discrimination. Individuals are rewarded for the work they produce, not the identity that they were born with. That is the vein in which our equal pay laws were put in place over 50 years ago: the same pay for the same work regardless of sex, race or disability. 

Equity, by contrast, is not about fairness between individuals but between statistical groups. Different group outcomes are seen as evidence of an injustice and therefore those outcomes must be reengineered until they are the same. To put it another way, the system itself is unfair, and so treating people equally within it will always lead to unfairness. This is the shoogly peg upon which the principle of “work of equal value” is hung.

“Equal value” claims invite employment tribunals to decide that completely different jobs should attract the same level of pay. In the case of Birmingham City Council, they compared predominantly male bin men with predominantly female teaching assistants. In the case of the retailer Next, men in the warehouse were pitted against women on the shop floor. To state the obvious, these jobs are not the same. Yet employment judges found that they essentially were. 

Was this a great victory for workers? Arguably not. Birmingham City Council’s proposed response was to cut salaries for bin men by up to £8,000 per year in order to balance the “equity” between the roles. The answer was to pull the men down, not lift the women up. 

The result is a system where pay is decided not by the employer who picks up the bill, nor the worker who chooses to apply for the job, but by an unaccountable employment tribunal judge comparing apples and oranges. 

Wages depend upon a complex web of labour market factors, scarcity of skill, unpleasantness of conditions, commercial benefit, and the willingness of individuals to undertake the work. There is no bureaucratic formula that can capture all of this complexity. 

Markets, whatever their imperfections, possess a remarkable capacity to reconcile these competing inputs through the hand of many individual decisions. Jobs are advertised and workers can choose whether or not to do them based on those wages. Indeed, in the case of Next, one retail worker told the tribunal she would only consider going to work in the warehouse if she was paid “a lot more money”. If even the workers don’t think these jobs deserve the same wages, how can a tribunal? 

This is not just an economic problem, but a cultural one too. Claims brought so far have been limited to sex. By expanding them into race and disability, the Government will be further embedding divisive identity politics into the workplace. The huge law firms promoting these cases, and the hedge funds that are “investing” their money to back them, are deliberately stirring up grievances and drawing battle lines between protected characteristics. 

A workplace should be a place where people are judged on their contribution, skills, experience and performance. It should not become a competition between demographic groups for identity-based recognition and reward.

There are practical difficulties too. Sex has a much clearer legal definition than race or disability. Sex is also, despite the insistence of many on the Left, a binary concept. Binary comparisons are much easier for the simple reason that there is only one group with which to compare the other.

Existing equal value claims have already bankrupted councils and harmed the competitiveness of employer

On the other hand, race and disability are self-declared and complex. A 2016 study published by the Royal Statistical Society found that 4 per cent of respondents changed their self-reported ethnicity between the 2001 and 2011 censuses. We know that bad law will be exploited by bad actors. What incentives would this rule create for people to start self-identifying to manipulate a favourable outcome? Will the entire finance department suddenly turn up with an autism diagnosis because they don’t like the fact that legal get paid more? 

Nor does any of this come without consequence. Existing equal value claims have already bankrupted councils and harmed the competitiveness of employers. There is a fundamental problem in decisions about more and more parts of our economy being handed over to unaccountable bureaucrats who pay no price for being wrong. 

This redefinition of equality to equity sits uncomfortably with a country increasingly weary of identity politics. It is tilting us ever more towards a perpetual redistribution between categories in the futile hope that statistical perfection can be achieved.  

We have already seen an explosion in discrimination and harassment claims, many of which end up being rejected by the tribunals because they have no basis in reality. But beyond the economic cost of these time-wasting cases lies a more serious problem. When victimhood becomes the currency of favour, we cannot be surprised if we end up with a society which desperately seeks to acquire victim status.