- Conference
- 2023 National LGBT+ Conference
- Date
- 12 September 2023
- Decision
- Carried
Conference is proud that UNISON is one of the founding members of the Disability Employment Charter which now has 147 organisations signed up to it, including trade unions, disabled people organisations, public service employers, charitable organisations, and private sector employers. The disability employment charter was founded because of the disadvantage that disabled people experience in the labour market and workplaces.
The charter calls on supporting disabled people into employment. Reform of Access to Work and Disability Confident, leveraging government procurement, improving the requirements to provide reasonable adjustments within a timeframe, require employers to consult and negotiate with disabled people and their representatives, provision of an ‘one stop shop’ portal for advice and support and monitoring national progress on disability employment.
A further ask of the charter is to require all employers with 250+ employees to publish data annually on: the number of disabled people they employ as a proportion of their workforce; their disability pay gap; and the percentage of disabled employees within each pay quartile.
Conference recognises that the current cost of living crisis has made the requirement of annual reporting of pay gaps in respect of ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability even more pressing.
Conference notes that since gender pay gap reporting was required for organisations with more than 250 employees there has been an improvement but there is still a long way to go. Trade Union Congress (TUC) reported that the disability pay gap means that generally disabled members will work from the 8 November for the rest of the year for zero pay.
Whilst there remains a lower Ethnicity pay gap, there are significant disparities in geographical areas.
In respect of the LGBT+ pay gap, there is very little official data but a YouGov survey in 2019 reported that LGBT+ workers were being paid an average £6,700 per year less than non-LGBT+ colleagues, a 16% pay gap.
UNISON’s experience is that trans, non-binary and gender diverse members are likely to be particularly impacted in respect of pay disparities. Conference believes that to address the remaining pay gaps, mandatory annual reporting of ethnicity, disability and LGBT+ pay gaps should be required from all employers with more than 250 workers. Conference further recognises that without the relevant diversity data, such reporting will be incomplete, and will not be robust.
Conference calls on the National LGBT+ Committee working with relevant national self organised group committees where appropriate to:
1)Review the LGBT+ workforce monitoring factsheet
2)Raise awareness of the disability, LGBT+, and ethnicity pay gaps with regions, branches and service groups
3)Publicise the Disability Employment Charter amongst the LGBT+ self organised group with information on how this can be used by branches.