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Comment by shubb | Hacker News Reader

Specifically, Birmingham had hired these jobs at the same pay grade, after formally assessing them to be equivalent. It then paid people hired under the same contract differently with special payments after garbage strikes.

If they had hired under a more complex pay grade structure, they would have been fine.

This is relevant to tech companies which may use fairly simple level structure.

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> garbage strikes

So, the garbage workers -- men -- used strikes to extort illegal, privileged pay raises for themselves?

You could think of it like they're all doing exactly the same job, and then a union voted to strike, as a result of which only the unionised workers got a bonus, and were kept at the same grade.

(Although I'm not really sure what my point is - that the council's lawyers should've (if they didn't) made that argument? - because unlike gender I don't think union membership is a protected characteristic per Equality Act 2010, obviously there are some different rules like you can't fire someone for being a member of a union, but paying someone less because they're not a member of a union seems probably fine? But anyway, as a public body the council has extra requirements for equality, not less, and the intention probably doesn't matter at all.)

Certainly hard to argue the higher wage was set by the market when it was set by strikes rather than the need to fill jobs.

Yielding to the strikers' demands may or may not have been wise, but I have not seen anything here saying this was, in itself, illegal: it became so when the council failed to extend those increases to other workers deemed (by its own rules, apparently) to be in equivalent positions.

Most likely not fine, but a tad trickier to be found out. U say a tad, because job classifications and pay grades are straight forward to do, even in court. In the end, it wouod have been an additional step during litigation.

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