03 March 2006
The Department of Trade and Industry's Women and Work Commission has urged the government to consider seriously allowing class actions in equal pay cases.
Speaking at the publication of the commission's report on February 27, chair Baroness Prosser said: 'Class actions seem to work elsewhere, and with the administrative nightmare we have in public sector claims it seems to me to be the way forward.'
Unions have called for the introduction of this type of claim for some years.
Although Prosser added her voice to those calls, she said that the details would have to be worked out by the DTI's Discrimination Law Review, expected to publish a green paper this summer.
The proposal 'to consider more fully' the introduction of class actions is one of the WWC's 40 recommendations to government and the private sector to end occupational segregation by gender, and the 17% pay gap between full-time male and female workers.
However, adopting the proposal would cost the Exchequer billions of pounds, said Stefan Cross, the controversial lawyer who last week won a £1.37m payout for 128 women workers at Middlesbrough council.
He told Public Finance: 'The biggest discriminator against women is the government. Nine out of ten equal pay cases are against the government.
'If you were to allow class action, the first people to be hit would be virtually every local council, every NHS trust and probably every department of Whitehall. The cost to the Exchequer would run into billions.'
Cross is a controversial figure in employment law, as he has taken on individual cases on a 'no win, no fee' basis, which trade unions have preferred to settle out of court.
As class actions are not permitted under English law, their introduction could require legislative change to define who could be deemed as a member of a 'class', who could represent them and how employers should respond to rulings.
Nicola Dandridge, head of equality at the union law firm Thompsons, said that the complexity of this type of claim had been overstated.
'If you've got women working as kitchen assistants and cooks in schools, they're all likely to be doing a very similar job. To determine whether or not they fall into a particular category does involve some sort of factual analysis, but it really is just a matter of looking at what people do.'
A spokeswoman for the DTI said: 'An analysis of the costs of potential changes to current enforcement mechanisms [of the Equal Pay Act] will be carried out as the work of the Discrimination Law Review progresses.'
PFmar2006
