Discrimination through Bargaining Structures: Gender Bias in the National Coal Board and British Coal

Abstract

In its analysis of the pay determination of British Coal canteen workers, this article introduces that by Kathy O’Donnell, who argues that, in all but name, canteen workers were part of a single bargaining structure that included male surface mineworkers. It is drawn from the evidence prepared for the National Union of Mineworkers in late 1990 in support of an equal pay claim for female canteen workers and cleaners employed by British Coal. The claim was successful. Two points clearly emerge. First, job segregation allowed women workers to be placed in a separate grading structure from men, and even if there was some overlap between the two at the bottom of the one and at the top of the other, the situation was one in which there was no effective difference from the operation of a single grading structure. But for this institutional segregation, there would have been a much more transparent instance of pay discrimination.