Dudley school dinner ladies win £500,000 payout
School dinner ladies have received a half a million pound payout after being 'cheated' out of money in a equal pay dispute with Dudley Council.
Forty women took action after finding out their colleagues had been awarded much more money when the council settled the original disputes. Some staff received tens of thousands of pounds less than others who did the same job.
The women – who were mostly school catering managers or kitchen staff – lost out after their legal representatives advised them to take an offer on the table from Dudley Council. For some, this was as little as a few hundred pounds, an amount which was then dwarfed by the huge payouts their co-workers received.
Claims for as much as £90,000 were paid to those who opted to wait it out.
Workers left furious at the huge discrepancies decided to take action against the legal teams who initially advised them to take the comparatively minuscule amounts.
The representatives – who have not been named – decided to settle and a total of £510,000 will be paid to the 40 women who lost out. The highest single award is understood to be around £30,000.
Angela Manley, a director of WH Law Solicitors, which secured the payout, said: "We are proud of what we have done for these ladies. We really felt for them, they felt they had been cheated in a way.
"It's difficult working alongside people who received bigger awards, life-changing sums."
Dudley Council became embroiled in an equal pay dispute with female workers in 2010 when it emerged men were being paid up to 130 per cent more than colleagues in similar roles.
Some women accepted offers in 2010 but later learned they could have claimed thousands of pounds more when colleagues went to tribunal or used their own law firm to go against the council and got larger rewards. Anna Garratt, 49, who worked for Dudley Council for 28 years and a ran a school kitchen in the borough until earlier this year, was among those to receive a payout.
The mother-of-one from Pensnett said: "I was a manager running a kitchen and they were paying me equal to a bin man. When we found out what other people were getting I was thinking 'hold on a minute, we should be getting that'. WH Law have been fantastic from start to finish."
