IT seems to me that the dispute between Leeds City Council and the refuse collectors who are members of the GMB Union is NOT about equal pay.
It is more about the council attempting to rob one set of workers to make up for their incompetence in incorporating equal pay for work of equal value over the past 30 or so years.
They have used some undisclosed formula to measure one group of p
redominantly female workers with a group of predominately male workers which has indicated that these workers should be paid the same rates. Fair enough.
But the council needed to find the money to bring the pay up to the men's wages. So they cast around to find the money needed to do this and allegedly couldn't find it because it was going to cost hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Hey presto, they thought, I know, let's look at this another way. Let's reduce the men's wages to those of the women! So much easier and it won't cost them a penny!
Only one problem – some of the men who were going to lose hundreds and others thousands of pounds in pay per year didn't think much of the idea, what with rent or mortgages to pay, council tax, energy bills et cetera, none of which were going down to match the reduction in wages.
Perhaps the councillors should have looked at their own pay, perks and allowances before picking on these people and stop using emotive language such as 'blackmail' to describe their actions. If they were to walk in the bin men's boots for just one day I don't think they would find this a fair solution.
So, get back around the table and talk it out to find a better way of sorting this out.
Vanessa Amis, Lingfield Gardens, Leeds
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