News In Focus
25 June 2009
Male council workers win “piggy back” pay claims
Three hundred council workers in the north east of England have won a legal decision over equal pay claims which could pave the way for up to 12,000 more cases to come forward.
The employment appeal tribunal ruled that the men should have been offered the same back pay as female council workers who had won their own case over equal pay.
The female workers had based their claim on a comparison with higher paid men doing other jobs; once they won their case, men who did the same jobs as the female claimants then sought parity with them.
Mr Justice Underhill said: "It would be surprising and unsatisfactory if the [Equal Pay] Act offered no remedy to men in a situation like the present.
"The case where men and women do the same job but receive different rates of pay is the paradigm of the kind of situation which the Act was intended to prevent, how would it seem if the roles were reversed and the 'piggyback' claimants were not men but women?"
Yvette Genn from law firm Cloisters said: "This ruling is what thousands of male workers who have not received equal pay up and down the country have been waiting for.
"There is no doubt that many of the similar 12,000 cases in the system will now proceed and are likely to be successful."