Are Litigation & Collective Bargaining Complements or Substitutes for Achieving Gender Equality? A Study of the British Equal Pay Act

Simon Deakin, Sarah Fraser Butlin, Colm McLaughlin and Aleksandra Polanska

Working Papers from Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge

Abstract: We present a socio-legal case study of the recent equal pay litigation wave in Britain, which saw an unprecedented increase in the number of claims, triggered in part by the entry of no-win, no-fee law firms into this part of the legal services market. Although the rise in litigation led to greater adversarialism in pay bargaining, litigation and collective bargaining mostly operated as complementary mechanisms in advancing an equality agenda. Litigation may be a more potent agent for social change than some recent analyses, which stress the limits of the law in the face of organisational pressures to canalise and diffuse human rights, have suggested.

Keywords: Equal pay; litigation strategies; social rights; collective bargaining (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J71 K31 K41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-12
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