Equal pay is unfair and penalises the workers who put in the most effort, a pioneering research study has said. It argues that real fairness means that companies and organisations should pay staff according to how hard and well they work.And it warned that organisations which put the dogma of equal pay for those doing similar jobs into practice risk disastrous collapses in productivity and morale among their staff.
The findings, presented to a Royal Economic Society conference, throw a major question mark over the ambition of paying workers equally that has governed the thinking of public sector employers and the courts for more than a decade.