Thread by @RichardMCNgo

So apparently UK courts can decide that two unrelated jobs are “of equal value”.

And people in the “underpaid” job get to sue for years of lost wages.

And this has driven their 2nd biggest city bankrupt.

Am I getting something wrong or is this as crazy as it sounds?

There are a bunch of equal pay cases, but the biggest is against Birmingham City Council, which paid over a billion pounds in compensation because some jobs (like garbage collectors) got bonuses and others (like cleaners) didn’t. Now the city is bankrupt.

theguardian.com/society/2023/s…

Here’s another that seems ridiculous: *warehouse operatives* and *sales consultants*, at a private company, in a unanimous decision!

Why not go all the way to central planning? Honestly at this point it feels like the UK is *trying* to immiserate itself.

hrmagazine.co.uk/content/news/n…

Retroactively invalidating consensual agreements undermines a bedrock economic freedom, and should only be done in very limited cases—and certainly not at large scales on the basis of an economically incoherent concept like "equal value".

“But what if we knew for certain that Birmingham only paid garbage collectors more because they were mostly men?”

Imagine that Birmingham had been forced to pay all of these groups equally all along. Obviously they wouldn’t have paid them all the highest salary - that would’ve

cost billions the council never had. Realistically they’d have just paid garbage collectors much less. So even if some compensation is deserved (which “equal value” arguments are inadequate to show), it should be *far* less than the headline gap between the two groups’ salaries.

But IMO *any* compensation in cases like these is a dangerous precedent. Better to let the market take care of it. Are these jobs really equal? Then people in the underpaid one can just switch. Oh, the bonus wasn’t enough to convince women to collect garbage? How strange…