Racism thriving and unchecked in pay systems of Scotland's public sector

From research carried out late last year, progress on delivering equal pay for women, disabled people and BME workers can now be mapped out and compared across Scotland's public sector.

Table 16 below confirms universities are leading performers when it comes to equal pay audits on the basis of staff ethnicity and publishing the pay gaps based on BME status.  Over 47% of university staff have had their pay system audited for evidence of race equality.  This is considerably in the lead from other public bodies which have a rate of 6.9% of staff covered by ethnic equal pay audits.  Councils are next, with just 3.3% of their staff covered by BME equal pay audits and Health Boards trail the rest of the sector with only 1.03% of staff having their pay systems audited for evidence of race equality.

Combined with the high performance of universities in employing BME people and in creating a working culture which encourages positive identification of ethnicity, there would appear to be considerable scope for the rest of the public sector learning from the success of universities and so being able to improve their own performance in and provide evidence of race equality in their function as employers.

Once more this data has been shared with the Equality & Human Rights Commission and Scottish government.  Once more the opportunity to try a fresh approach to race equality which has been shown to deliver evidenced results is left to gather dust.