02 January 2008

Councils face £2.8bn fine in backdated pay for women.

The Guardian today reported that following a Local Government Employers study, councils in England have been discriminating against women significantly and consistently. This is bad enough, but the biased way that this serious issue has been reported reveals a great deal about the attitude of the mainstream media towards women. The Guardian is supposedly a thoughtful, left-leaning broadsheet, but this report reads more like it has been written by one of the rags.

Curtis criticises women for resorting to no-win no-fee lawyers in order to try to seek justice:

Council leaders and trade unions today warn the bill could escalate because local deals being thrashed out are under threat from firms of no-win no-fee lawyers. The lawyers, who pick out individual cases, say they are simply fighting for women to get the full six years in back pay they may claim, but the local deals typically reach smaller settlements to ensure all women, systematically, receive some money without making deep cuts in services.
However, later in the article, she cites an example of a woman who was offered a pitiful and insulting sum to 'repay' her for the discrimination which she has suffered.

Rosaline Wilson, 60, from Guisborough, near Middlesbrough, earned £6.50 an hour managing a team of 13 care workers for Redcar and Cleveland council. She was offered £5,000 to settle out of court but won £32,000 with a no-win no-fee lawyer.
We should assume that Polly Curtis thinks the stupid bitches should just shut the fuck up and stop creating such a big, expensive mess.

Why shouldn't women claim the money that they are owed? They have worked just as hard as the men at the same jobs, and whilst I understand that it is a problem if the money to repay these women is coming out of the budget for other areas of the council's work, the question of how this bill is to be financed is really not their problem. Women shouldn't have been discriminated against in the first place, and if the councils don't like it, then there is a simple and effective solution to make sure that this does not happen again: Do not discriminate against anyone.

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