The equal pay scandal
Finding a way into a complicated story
I have a story out in the Guardian Long Read today about councils systematically underpaying their female employees - and in particular about one woman in Glasgow’s fight for equal pay.
I knew I wanted to write something on this subject last autumn, when it hit the news that Birmingham City Council - one of the biggest local authorities in Europe - was effectively declaring bankruptcy. There were multiple reasons for this, including catastrophic funding cuts to councils since 2010, and some terrible financial decisions (like spending over £100m on an IT system that doesn’t work). But the thing that really caught my eye was that Birmingham said it had a liability of up to £760m in equal pay claims. This was all the more remarkable since the council had already paid out £1.1bn in equal pay claims just over a decade ago: a mind-boggling amount of money. I read that Glasgow City Council had also, to date, paid out around £760m in equal pay claims, and had sold off numerous council buildings (including the City Chambers and the Kelvingrove Art Gallery) to fund it. More equal pay claims were being filed against councils around the country. The figures involved were so extraordinarily high, and the consequences so significant - Birmingham freezing all spending except services they’re legally required to provide, Glasgow selling off some of their most famous buildings - that I wanted to know more.
The challenge with a subject like this is to find a way to make it narratively compelling; essentially, to explore an important issue such as sex discrimination at public institutions without being overly technical or boring. The most straightforward way to do this is to find the people at the heart of it, and try to tell a story about them. (As a side point, this is a good example of what editors mean when they say they want a story, not a topic - I used to find this feedback unclear and frustrating when I first started doing long-form journalism. Equal pay at councils is a topic; specific women fighting for equal pay is a story.)
When I first spoke to Frances Stojilkovic on the phone, I knew that she would be a great subject for a story. Now in her 60s, Frances is a home carer from Glasgow who has no interest in politics (“they’re all as bad as each other”) and never imagined she’d end up as a campaigner. She was thrust into it after realising she and other women were being, in her words “robbed and shafted by the council”. Legal claims for compensation had been languishing in the employment tribunal system for almost a decade when Frances, outraged at the discovery that men in equivalent jobs were getting £3 more per hour than carers, took up the issue. She had little faith in the unions, who had largely ignored the issue of equal pay, so off her own back she started emailing councillors to demand an answer, and when that didn’t work, set up a Facebook group for women to share information. The group took on a life of its own, expanding until it had thousands of members. Frances used it as a vehicle to organise protests and inform women that they could have a claim. The public pressure put the issue on the political agenda and forced the unions to take equal pay seriously. It ended with the council agreeing to negotiate a settlement with its female workers.
Although at first my idea was to look in detail at Birmingham, I ended up focusing the story almost entirely on Glasgow, because Frances and the other women had really fought a grassroots, ground-up campaign that I found very compelling. I was immediately interested in her, what she’d done and how she’d experienced this whole thing, which is usually a good indicator that readers will be too.
The New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright has talked about how useful it is to focus on one particular person to guide the reader through complex terrain. He said:
“I call them donkeys. It sounds like a derogatory term. But a donkey is a very useful beast of burden and it can carry a lot of information on its back, and also it will take the reader into a world that he may not understand or may not have thought he cared about until you have this donkey.”
He’s right: it does sound a bit like a derogatory term. But it’s a very useful way of describing the process of putting a story like this together. Once you have that person who you can fold the wider story around, it becomes a much more straightforward task to write in a way that keeps the reader engaged. The difficult part, in my experience, is not being able to include everything you want to because of that narrative focus. Other women I spoke to for this story also had incredible, moving stories, particularly Shona Thomson, another campaigner who in the end was only mentioned briefly in this story. I’d have loved to have the space to write more about her.
However, while I was wading through long employment tribunal judgments and trying to understand how employers work out which jobs are directly comparable to each other, I was very glad to have Frances’s story to return to and anchor it all. As she said, in a quote that I was sad to lose from the final version: “What’s the difference between a man and a woman? You’ve got to pay the same rent, the same bills.”
Read the full story over at the Guardian Long Read.
Reading/listening
This London Review of Books essay by Pankaj Mishra about Germany’s commitment to Israel is fascinating.
I’ve been re-listening to some old episodes of Heavyweight, which is SUCH A GOOD PODCAST. It’s sadly been canned by Spotify, but is looking for a new home, which I hope it finds.
I just read this sobering Teen Vogue piece from last year about the children of family influencers and how much they hated having their lives broadcast without their consent.
Finally, this Substack is brand new! If you enjoyed it, please hit subscribe or share this post with anyone who you think might be interested (forward the email, post it on socials, whatever!). If there are things you’d like me to write about, let me know. Thank you for reading this far - I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.