Today is No Pay Day

By Ronit Wolfson and Hazel Nolan

The clocks officially go back today, and tomorrow most Londoners will go back to work. But the clocks are not the only thing going backwards – gender pay parity is too.

Research from the Chartered Management Institute shows the gender pay gap is widening; figures from the ONS put it at around 17% for full time work. This means that from today until the end of the year, women are effectively working for nothing. Women No Pay Day, today, is a Fawcett Society/UNISON campaign highlighting this shocking statistic. Even more shocking is the Chartered Management Institute’s estimate that unless we do something to reverse this trend, it will take until 2109 to close the gap.

This of course, is of course only applicable to the women that currently are in employment. Data taken from the quarterly Labour Force Survey (LFS) shows that more than a million women are now out of work, the highest figure since 1988. A record half a million are currently on unemployment benefit – bad for women, bad for government, bad for everyone. Add in the disproportionate impact of the cuts on women, which will see single-mothers lose on average an entire months income and it is clear that this government is not a government of women, and certainly not a government for women.

The Fawcett Society identifies three main reasons for why the gender pay gap persists. Firstly it’s estimated by up to 40% of the pay gap is due to straightforward discrimination; more worrying still when we consider how hard the Tories are trying to make it to challenge unfair dismissal and discrimination at work. Secondly, jobs traditionally done by women are paid less. The third explanation is that mothers often work below their skill level because lower skilled jobs are more likely to give them the flexibility to balance
work and home.

This is why it is important, now more than ever, for women to take a greater role in all aspects of our movement. That means ensuring that we train and support women to be effective campaigners and, crucially, to stand as candidates. It means that we need to ensure that all women shortlists are protected in the boundary review. It means that we need to work with our trade union colleagues to make women visible, not just on campaigns like the pensions protest on 30th November, but at all levels of the trade union movement, taking a lead from our Nordic and Scandinavian counterparts.

The issues which affect women are no longer just ‘women’s issues’ – the biggest threat to women in this country is an economic one. To have such gross pay inequality in this day and age is horrifying; which is why we need to work hard in Opposition to build a progressive coalition of Labour women to take the Tories to task. The Tories know that they cannot win without the women’s vote, and it is our job to make sure that Labour women are getting that message out.

Ronit Wolfson is the London Young Labour Women’s Officer and Hazel Nolan is London Young Labour Trade Union Liaison