Equal pay for equal work?

Date: 14/11/1996

THERE is a multinational company operating in Europe which employs 626 people, all doing exactly the same job, and yet pays them 15 different rates of pay according to their country of origin.

The salaries of the lowest-paid are about a quarter of those of the highest-paid. Eighty-seven of the employees, all from the same country, were recently given a massive rise of about 30&percent;, although they had done nothing more to deserve it than any of their colleagues.

There is little doubt that this particular employer is guilty of the most blatant discrimination and yet this matter has still not reached the European Court of Justice, despite prime facie evidence of a breach of EU equality laws on a breathtaking scale.

Neither are we hearing the kind of emotional public outcry that has dogged much less-celebrated cases of worker oppression: NAME THIS FIRM! SACK THE BOSSES!

There seem to be no massive weekend rallies of protesters on the streets, waving their banners proclaiming: EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK! BURN DOWN THE BOARDROOM!

Because we already know who it is who operates such an unacceptable regime. We even know every member of the downtrodden workforce, or if we don't we can easily look them up and read all about them. Some of us even helped them to get their jobs.

Now look at the poor things - victims of racism by birthright, strait-jacketed by a regime which sets a 48-hour working week as a minimum requirement, not a maximum; which breeds a culture of supremacy in which the lowly-paid are mocked by the well-off and where resentment inevitably builds on resentment at shop-floor level.

So much for fairness. So much for setting an example. So much for the modern European Parliament, guardian of the rights of citizens, defender of the single market, upholder of all that is decent and right.

It was not until the other night that the daftness of it all really hit home. There was Hedy d'Ancona, a red-haired sparkly-eyed Dutch Socialist MEP, banging on about how she - number two in the Socialist pecking order in Strasbourg - was paid a larger salary than her boss, Pauline Green from London.

Hedy did not personalise the matter like that, sticking instead to generalities, but that is what it boils down to.

“It's unbelievable,” she declared, in a fit of outrage at the silliness of the situation.

And of course, when you stop to ponder it, which right-thinking people everywhere seldom do, it is very silly indeed.

This glaring inconsistency has been there for ever, a legacy of the old European Parliament which was made up of delegated representatives from the member states' national parliaments.

They, of course, were merely visitors, so their widely-differing rates of pay were not an issue.

What mattered, then as now, was the harmonisation of expenses and allowances and in that, there was - and still is - no distinction between the nationalities. Everybody is overpaid and lacking in what is supposed to be the European Parliament's raison d'être: accountability.

But the difference in salary scales remains a ludicrous anachronism.

When MEPs were first directly elected in 1979, nobody thought to put them on the same pay rates, and none of the lower-paid members had the nerve to strike and refuse to work until they received the same wage as the others.

In any other company, there would have been instant uproar. But when your harmonised expenses are so huge that you can't avoid making piles of cash every time you hail a cab to the airport, who is going to complain that their basic pay is 10, 20 or 30,000 ecu a year short of what the MEP in the next seat is getting?

So now what are we going to do?

Parliament President Klaus Hänsch is embarking on a valedictory expenses purge, with the harmonisation of salaries as an add-on extra.

But if he thinks highly-paid Italian or German MEPs are going to take a salary cut in the interests of equality and fairness towards their poorer brethren, he is much mistaken.

It is not that the well-paid are being greedy, it is just that no worker who has attained a certain level of pay is going to tolerate such a backward step - and for any Euro MP to offer to do so would be to send the wrong signal to employers everywhere.

Hedy emerged from the inaugural meeting of Hänsch's expense-cutting inquiry gamely denying that the answer was the harmonisation of salaries at the highest rates.

But there is no logical alternative. In any company, workers would expect salaries to level out at the highest rate, and the guardians of the treaties would be the first to defend the interests of the masses.

The only circumstances in which lower pay would be readily accepted by workers would be if they were given artificially inflated expenses to bridge the gap.

But the European Parliament is on a promise to do exactly the reverse.

After all, the prime aim of the Hänsch expenses inquiry is to end the current regime of fixed-rate, uncheckable allowances, so there will no comfort for the higher-paid there.

No, the answer is to bring all Euro MPs up to the pay rates of the highest, impose a pay freeze for five years and then take cover until the outcry has died down.

That, coupled with the reimbursement of expenses strictly against production of authorised receipts, would put the European Parliament in a much stronger position to lecture the rest of us about how life should be ordered.

It's either that or face charges in the European Court of Justice.

I must warn our MEPs that I have already urged the European Commission to begin legal proceedings in the ECJ. After all, the Commission is supposed to preside over adherence to the EU treaties and does not tolerate abuses of its equality laws.

Unfortunately, I was unable to put this point to officials in the Directorate-General for social affairs in person as they were far too busy to see me. They were fully occupied ensuring that no new recruits for jobs with the Commission slipped through the maximum age limit of 35.

That, at least, is one piece of blatant discrimination no one could accuse the European Parliament of - unless the worry over pay and perks is making the vast majority of our MEPs grow old before their time.