SEX DISCRIMINATION AND EQUAL PAY LAW

Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Law in the England and USA

SEX DISCRIMINATION AND EQUAL PAY LAW IN THE ENGLAND AND USA.

Introduction

Lord Davey in Allen v Flood [1898] AC 1, 172, said that 'a boss may deny to provide work a [workman] for the most mistaken, capricious, malicious or ethically reprehensible motives that can be conceived, but the workman has no right of activity against him.' The gendered dialect is significant. This law in UK and united states applied not just to refusals to engage workers but, for example, to dismissals of women who married, and to paying women less than men, even when they were performing the same job (see Lord Atkinson in Roberts v Hopwood [1925] AC 578, 596, describing the East End of London borough of Poplar Council's policy of equal for the same work as 'misguided principles of socialistic philanthropy': the popular vote was held not to prevail over the financial interest of council ratepayers). Until the 1970s identical pay between the sexes was except for educators rare. There were exceptions to the principle of non-intervention: the Musicians' Union successfully defended a boycott of color bars in dancehalls (Scala Ballroom (Wolverhampton) Ltd v Ratcliffe [1958] 1 WLR 1057, CA) but that was in the context of a tortuous claim of conspiracy against the Union at a time when the courts were loath to intervene in industrial disputes. Women had broken into the Jockey association: Nagle v Feilden [1966] 2 QB 633, CA, even if Lord Denning MR's reasoning that female racehorse trainers had a 'right to work' was dubious, to state the least. (Ronalds - 2008, 65)

Discussion

The Disabled Persons (Employment) Act 1944, a statute aimed at the reintegration of severely injured military personnel into the labor force, provided for a 3% quota for disabled workers but the Act seems never to have been enforced; indeed, enforcement was in the hands of the Secretary of State for Employment (now Business, Innovation and Skills) and was by means of criminal proceedings, a method of enforcement not in the modern armory or 'toolkit' as it is called of the regulation of the employment relationship. (Greene - 2010, 87)

Fifty years ago it could be easily said that there was only scanty anti-discrimination law in UK and United States in employment. The position outside of employment law in UK and United States was worse: if the law in UK and United States was fragmentary in employment law, outside it was negligible. Women were permitted to sit in Parliament (Sex Disqualification (Removal) proceed 1919) but, for demonstration, the vintage universities were split on gender lines.

This note seeks to outline the develop of the law in UK and united states of discrimination in the next section and towards the end demonstrate how the Equality bill will to some degree switch the focus from individual enforcement by workers to preventive action by employers.

Discrimination law in UK and united states developments

Equal pay

It is debatable whether equal pay between men ...