ABSTRACT
The story here is an unhappy one, both in a technical legal sense and in a policy sense. It is a story of total failure to get to grips with the issues.164
The Equal Pay Act 1970 originally contained, in s 3, a limited provision aimed at remedying discrimination in collective agreements. If a provision of an agreement referred ‘specifically to men or women only’, it could be referred to the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC), which had the power to alter the terms of the agreement so as to eliminate discrimination. By virtue of the normal contractual effect of collective agreements, any such amendment would have become incorporated into the contract of employment of the individual employee. The problem with the law, of course, was that the likelihood of finding agreements, which referred expressly to men or women only, rapidly disappeared once the Act came into force. The real equality issue came to be seen as agreements which had a discriminatory effect, in particular where occupational segregation meant that different agreements in practice applied to women or men only. The CAC took jurisdiction over such situations, but, in R v Central Arbitration Committee ex p Hy-Mac,165 the Divisional Court held that such activity and activism was beyond their powers. The decision in effect made s 3 a dead letter.
