Council workers in Scotland intend to take strike action unless the local authority responds to demands to settle a dispute over equal pay. In 2019, following a union campaign involving strike action, Glasgow council agreed a £500 million (€594 million) settlement of equal pay claims up until March 2018 and included a new pay and grading system to rectify issues of unequal pay, primarily of women. Since then, around 5,500 new claims have been lodged for the period prior to March 2018, with nearly 20,000 claimants waiting on settlements for the period after that. The unions want to ensure that new claimants receive the terms of the 2019 agreement but the council has said that it may not be able to finally settle its debt to these women until 2024, with no progress has been made on the issue of interim payments.
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For more information, please contact Paul de Beer or Oana Ciuca, De Burcht (Scientific Bureau for the Dutch Trade Union Movement) p.t.debeer@uva.nl or the Head of communications at the ETUI, Mehmet Koksal mkoksal@etui.org. For previous full issues of the Collective bargaining newsletter please visit https://www.etui.org/Newsletters/Collective-bargaining-newsletter or consult the archive with all articles in our database at www.cbnarchive.eu.
You may find further information on the ETUI at www.etui.org.