- Conference
- 2023 National Delegate Conference
- Date
- 20 February 2023
- Decision
- Carried as Amended
Conference believes that the ethnicity pay gap (EPG) is a major cause of in-work poverty experienced by Black workers and the cause of severe intergenerational inequality in Black communities.
Conference welcomes the moves made by the National Black Members Committee (NBMC) to highlight and campaign to close the gap.
The EPG is as high as 23.8 percent in London with huge regional variations across the UK.
In 2017, the government committed in its manifesto to ask large employers to publish information on their ethnicity pay gaps. (In 2018 only 11% of employers published their ethnicity pay gap, this percentage increased to 19% in 2021. Comparison of median pay at the TUC shows there is a gap of 11.7% between white and Black staff pay in April 2021).
The introduction of this important measure is needed to identify the disparities within the workforce and forces employers to be accountable.
Conference calls on the National Executive Council to:
1)Make closing the EPG a UNISON priority in the union’s bargaining, organising and campaigning agendas;
2)Produce a UNISON toolkit to implement mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting and encourage branches to utilise it;
3)Use its influence within TUC to encourage all affiliate unions to make closing the EPG a key priority in the sectors they organise within;
4)Request that the union’s Labour Link exercise its influence with the aim that Labour Party’s manifesto for the next general election contains a commitment to create a statutory duty on all public service employers to annually report their EPG and take proactive steps to address detrimental disparities experienced by their Black workers.