US Vice President Elect Kamala Harris will be the highest ranking female elected official in American history.
Joan Pettingill, head of employment law and HR services at Wake Smith, looks at what the election of the democrat and the first multi-racial woman of colour in this senior White House role, might mean for US labour law issues and the corresponding topics on this side of the pond.
Joan said: “Ms Harris’s labour law influence is likely to be around improving economic prospects for people of colour including Black lives and looking to address diversity issues whether these are around race, gender or other forms of inequality.
“Additionally one of her economic priorities is to raise incomes for lower earners to $500 pcm and whilst there is a minimum wage in the US it seems the mechanism for this would be via tax credits rather than an increase in that $7.25 minimum wage.
“There is also likely to be increased legislative support of trade unions which are regarded, through pay bargaining, as one of the means to improve the economic welfare of working and middle class US employees.”
So what’s the situation in the UK currently?
Joan said: “According to the ONS, in this country, the ethnicity pay gap overall has decreased to 2.3%. This means that workers of ethnic origin other than white British earned on average 2.3% less than their white counterparts.
“However these figures also mask larger pay gap differences between different ethnic groups within our labour market. The pay data is interesting.
“For example, Chinese, white Irish and Indian and Asian earn approximately 5% more on average however black African and Caribbean or other Asian background workers consistently earn less than comparative white workers.
“It is also apparent that as regards ethnicity, generally speaking the pay gap is larger for men than for women and also differs across the regions of the UK with London having larger pay gaps.
“Both Conservative & Labour party manifestos in 2017 included proposals for ethnicity pay gap reporting and a consultation on this was launched in 2018.”
In this country, employers with 250 or more employees must, by law, publish and report certain figures about their gender pay gap. The latest ONS report on the gender pay gap took into account the period up to 22 April 2020.
Joan added: “This included a portion of time when many staff were on furlough leave under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme.
“The figures suggest that furlough didn’t have a great impact on the gender pay gap which for full time employees was 7.4% meaning the gap in pay between men and women had decreased slightly from a 9% gap from 2019.
“Across all employees the gender pay gap was still high. Women across the piece being paid 15.5% less than male counterparts although slightly improved from 17.4% in 2019.”
When all the vote counting is done, and when any challenges to that along the way have been addressed, Kamala Harris is set to assume office in January next year.
Joan added: “At that time the outlook for HR directors in this country is set to be very interesting with the tone of US labour law influence, and trade relations, changing just at a time when we shall also know whether we have a deal or no deal Brexit.”
For further information about employment law, pay and diversity and collective issues and your workforce, contact Joan Pettingill, Head of Employment Law & HR Services at [email protected] or call 0114 224 2087.
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