The Labour party has pledged to extend full equal pay rights to ethnic minority workers and disabled people if it gains power.
Currently the equal pay regime only applies on grounds of sex. Under the party’s plans, a new Race Equality Act would enshrine in law the full right to equal pay for black, Asian and ethnic minority workers and disabled people.
It said the changes would be phased in to give employers time to adjust. The plans would also be subject to a consultation before being introduced.
The Equality Act 2010 enables individuals to make a claim that they have been discriminated against because of race or disability, but for complaints about pay or other contractual terms, women have stronger protections against unequal pay than other groups.
Labour proposals
In sex-based equal pay claims, the claimants need to find a comparator to show that they have been employed to do equal work but receive less. There are no details so far as to how this would work for ethnicity and disability.
As employment lawyer Darren Newman points out in his A Range of Reasonable Responses blog, equal pay claims based on sex are well established: “We have decades of case law on what equal work means and it is not a straightforward question. Equal pay is an all or nothing claim. Your work is either equal or it isn’t,” he says.
“If your job is worth 80% of that of your chosen comparator then you lose. It doesn’t matter if the comparator’s pay is more than twice what you are earning. No matter how disproportionate the differential, the fact that the two jobs are not equal defeats the claim.”
Daniel Barnett, in his latest Employment Law Bulletin, describes the plan as “shadow boxing”.
“If a black, Asian or minority ethnic employee is paid less than a white employee on grounds of their race, they can recover the difference as an ordinary race discrimination claim. (Granted, there are technical differences in the legal tests, but those will only change the result in a tiny minority of cases),” he explains.
Under the new Act, Labour will also move forward with statutory ethnicity pay gap reporting – something the current government decided not to make mandatory in 2022 after an independent review suggested it would not be appropriate for all employers.
This would likely require employers with 250 employees or more to publish figures on the difference in hourly pay between workers of different ethnicities. A number of employers already do this voluntarily.
Labour leader Keir Starmer hinted the party would draft a new race equality act in 2020, later setting up a task force chaired by Baroness Doreen Lawrence.
Further proposals likely to be in the act are race training for police staff, and the creation of a new body to collect data on ethnic minority health outcomes.
Sign up to our weekly round-up of HR news and guidance
Receive the Personnel Today Direct e-newsletter every Wednesday
Anneliese Dodds, shadow women and equalities secretary, said: “Inequality has soared under the Conservatives and too many Black, Asian and ethnic minority families are working harder and harder for less and less. This is holding back their families and holding back the economy.”
Reward, compensation and benefits opportunities
Browse all comp and benefits jobs
