Admin & Clerical Staff

We've had lots of enquiries from Admin & Clerical workers - asking how they're affected by all this equal pay business.

The answer is quite simple - Admin & Clerical staff have the same basic claim as anyone else because - like most female dominated council jobs - this group has been badly undervalued and underpaid for years.

Many admin and clerical jobs are paid around grade GS3 on the old APT& C pay scales - that's not much more than £7.00 an hour for work that requires:

• Good basic qualifications
• Good reading and writing skills
• Interpersonal, organisational and team working skills
• Post school qualifications - and often high level IT and computer skills

Yet, these female dominated jobs are paid a lot less than unskilled, traditional male jobs - such as refuse collectors, road sweepers, gardeners and gravediggers - jobs that don't require qualifications of any kind.

The female dominated jobs are paid around £7.00 per hour - but the male jobs get between £9 - £12.00 per hour - and that's the way things have been for years.

The employers don't want their women workers to know what's been going on because - quite rightly - people will bang in an equal pay claim once they realise how badly they've been conned over the years.

And the unions don't want their women members to know what's been going on either - because the women will obviously ask: "What the hell have we been paying our union dues for all these years?"

That's why there's been a conspiracy of silence from both the employers and the trade unions - because they've negotiated, but kept hidden, the much higher rates of pay for the traditional male jobs - and that's completely unfair to the rest of a predominantly female workforce.

But the good news is that Action 4 Equality has let the genie out of the bottle - and now there's no going back to the bad old days - when women workers were kept deliberately in the dark.