It’s Time To Report The Pay Gap by Les May

WHEN I first became interested in left wing politics in the early 1960s the people I met were primarily interested reducing inequalities of income, wealth, power and influence. Times change; being ‘of the left’ today frequently means an obsession with identity politics. Inequalities between groups which can be attributed to differences of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation, you name it, are all seen as grist to the mill. Inequalities of income, wealth, power and influence within these different groups are largely ignored.

Today the BBC reported; ‘Three quarters of employers want large firms to be forced to release data on the pay gap between staff of different ethnicities, a leaked report shows. The findings, seen by the BBC, came from a consultation exercise on ethnicity pay gap reporting launched by Theresa May in October 2018. The then PM promised to 'help employers identify the actions needed to create a fairer and more diverse workforce'. But two years later, the government has yet to respond’.

The news report included an interview with someone who was described as a ‘consultant’, which presumably means they were being paid quite a lot of money for doing this very important job. Now it happens that the interviewee was a woman and she was black. But the question which occurs to me is should I get more excited that in some big company someone who happens to be black and/or a woman is being paid a paltry £110,000 when her white male counterpart is being paid £120,000, or should I be more concerned that the same company has a proportion of it’s staff on zero hours contracts being paid minimum wage.

If we are going to have big companies forced to report the pay gap between staff of different ethnicities and sexes, then by the same token companies should be forced to report the differences in remuneration between executives, managers, shop floor workers and toilet cleaners.

One of the ways I shall judge Keir Starmer is whether he shows any sign of a commitment to reducing income and wealth inequalities. Signposting his willingness to support mandatory reporting of the pay gap within companies would be a good start.

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