The inadequacies of the Equal Pay Act have already been exposed in several recent disputes - including a strike by women workers at the GEC factory on the Treforest Trading Estate at Pontypridd in Wales.
The GEC women were demanding that they be paid the minimum semi-skilled man's wage, requiring an increase of £3.40. Eventually, after six weeks on SLEIKC. they were forced to accept £2.50. Meanwhile, however, the Womens Kons Commitee tor wales 120 written to Employment Minister Michael Foot about the dispute.
The Women's Rights Committee reminded Mr Foot that they had expressed their disquiet to him about loopholes in the Equal Pay Act at a conference held by Rhymney Valley District Council in October 1975. He had assured them then that he would personally act upon mormaton received abour women work ers not receiving equal pay. So would he issue a statement of support and give other positive help to the GEC women?
Five weeks later, on 1 April, the Women's Rights Committee finally got a reply - not from Mr Foot, but from some low-level bureaucrat. "To help', he wrote, 'I am enclosing a copy of a Guide to the Equal Pay Act!
He kindly went on: "I understand that the women at the Gec ractor were not doing the same or broadly simwar work as a man in the ractory nor had their work been rated as equivalent to a man's so that this provision of the Act did not apply....The Act does not re quire job evaluation."
And while the Act also provides for the removal of discrimination against women in the provisions of collective agreements and employers' pay structures, unfortunately I am advised that the pay structure at the GEC factory did not discriminate against women in a way that could be reterred....or am endment under the Act.
In other words, the gaps left by the Act are wide enough for the employers to drive a cart and horses through, and Mr Foot and the Department of Employment are not prepared to do anything about it. caved in completely. Struggle can succeed where the Act fails. After three months on strike, supported by their male colleagues and laid-off shop floor workers, women staff workers at Cockburn Valves near Glasgow won increases of between f5 and £8.30 as management STRIKE