TUC Equality Audit 2020-2021

With so many changes needed to bring equality and diversity to the world of work, many unions must have a way to set priorities for bargaining on equality issues. They have a variety of mechanisms for this, with most using a range of these. The two most commonly mentioned are through national conference debates and decisions, and specialist equality committees or conferences, with national executives also often playing a part.

Other routes are union officials, local reps’ input, membership consultations such as through surveys and, in unions which have them, industrial committees.

The NASUWT’s response to the question of how it set its current equality priorities sums up the range of methods used:

“The NASUWT sets its current collective bargaining priorities as a direct result of the 2016 TUC Equality Audit. Priorities are also set on the following basis: – national conference or executive committee decisions – recommendations from equality bodies within the union – consultation with members – annual consultative conferences with members of under-represented groups/with protected characteristics – research including focus groups of specific members – identification of trends in casework.”

Equality topics unions cover

TUC Equality Audits have always found unions’ priorities in equality bargaining to be as wide-ranging as the sectors they cover, but equal pay is a perennial common topic. This time unions were asked if there had been any changes in their equality bargaining priorities over the last four years.

While the range of topics cited is, again, extremely wide, pay equality is still a common theme – either in terms of ensuring equal pay or tackling gender or other pay gaps. Other commonly mentioned topics were:

• women’s pensions
• menopause
• maternity agreements
• disability, including mental health
• sexual harassment.

Another way of getting an idea of union priorities is by looking at what equality training and guidance they provide for their negotiators.

Section C looks in detail at unions’ training provision, but in summary the most common topic of training provided to paid officials, apart from general equalities training, is pay and employment equality. However, the most widespread training topic for lay negotiators, after general equalities, is harassment and bullying.

The detail of topics on which unions have produced guidance for negotiators is also set out in section C. In summary, the most common areas for guidance provided by unions are flexible working/WLB and – again – harassment and bullying.

Monitoring equality gains in collective agreements

Just over a third of unions (36 per cent) monitor their collective agreements to gain a picture of equality gains or other equality impacts they have achieved – a higher proportion than in 2016 (24 per cent). Not surprisingly, the practice is more common among large unions, where two in three unions conduct monitoring (67 per cent).

One in two unions (50 per cent) produces a formal report on the outcome of collective bargaining achievements on equalities issues, most often through the annual reports to their national conferences. In 2016, just 17 per cent of unions said they produced a formal report.

The TSSA is one union that carries out monitoring and also produces a report. It audits the companies it negotiates with against its ‘TSSA Equality Bargaining Standards’ and reports the results in its Equality in the Rail Industry report conducted every five years. It also uses the TUC Equality Audits as a benchmark. The union notes that this is a fairly new process so it is still working to ensure that the reporting and monitoring process is systematic.