GMB opens an indicative equal pay ballot at Leeds council on 18 September

GMB opens an indicative ballot of its members at Leeds City Council on 18 September 2026 — International Equal Pay Day — asking whether they would be prepared to take industrial action in principle over an equal pay claim. More than 4,000 women have joined the claim, which the union says could be worth hundreds of millions of pounds. An indicative ballot is not a strike ballot. If enough members vote yes, GMB says the next step is a full strike ballot.

The comparison at the centre of it is the familiar one: jobs done mostly by women, with teaching assistant the example the union gives, set against jobs done mostly by men, such as refuse collection.

The thing readers get wrong. Hearing ‘council pay dispute’, most people picture the annual pay round. This is a different animal, and seeing why takes one fact about how council pay is built.

There is one national pay spine. The National Joint Council (NJC) sets a salary for each spinal column point, and councils on its Green Book pay the same figure for the same point. That part is national, published, and identical for a teaching assistant in Leeds and a refuse collector in Leeds.

What is local is which points a job is paid on. Single status brought in national pay spines but no national grades: each council runs its own job evaluation and agrees its own grading structure, so grades map onto the spine differently in different authorities. Councils also attach extras to particular jobs — bonus schemes, contractual overtime, standby and call-out, attendance payments. Historically those extras clustered in manual work that was mostly done by men.

So two jobs can be rated as equal work, sit on national rates that are the same to the penny, and still pay very differently once the local grade and the local add-ons are counted. No national award closes that gap, because the gap is not in the national rates. It is in the grade and the extras.

What is at stake. Where an equal pay claim succeeds, a tribunal can order arrears of pay. Under section 132 of the Equality Act 2010, arrears in a standard case reach back six years from the day proceedings start in England and Wales, and five years in Scotland. Leeds is in England. Six years of a weekly gap, multiplied across four thousand people, is how ‘hundreds of millions’ stops being rhetoric.

Leeds City Council says it prides itself on treating people fairly and is determined to foster truly inclusive workplaces where there is no room for discrimination of any kind. It settled some elements of the claims in November 2025, in a joint statement issued with GMB, and says that despite further discussions it has not reached a settlement on the elements that remain. It says it wants to continue talks, while adding that it must manage its budgets in what it calls a prudent and robust manner, and that any settlement must reflect that.

If you work for another council. A ballot in Leeds changes nothing in your pay this month. What it does is show you where to look. Your national rate sits on the NJC spine, and this year’s national increase is on the pay award page. Neither of those tells you which grade your job was evaluated into, or which allowances attach to it and not to the job at the next desk. Those are local documents, held by your own employer — and that is where an equal pay question actually lives.

Where these figures come from

• Union to ballot thousands of council workers over equal pay claim — TheBusinessDesk.com
• Leeds faces equal pay claim worth 'hundreds of millions' — GMB Union
• Equality Act 2010: Explanatory Notes, section 132 — legislation.gov.uk
• Equal pay claims — Equality and Human Rights Commission
• Joint statement issued by Leeds City Council and the GMB union — Leeds City Council

Every figure traces to a dated document — the line this section is named after. If one here is wrong, tell us and it gets fixed publicly. Work out your own figures.