The UK government introduced the Equal Pay (Amendment) Regulations 1983 as a result of a ruling of the European Court of Justice (Commission of the European Communities v. United Kingdom [1982 ] I.C.R . 57 8 (E.C.J.). Made on 6 December 1983, the regulations came into force on 1 Janaury 1984.
The Regulations introduced into law the right for women to claim equal pay for work of equal value whether or not her employer has put in place a system of job classification to determine equivalence between jobs. Section 3 of the Regulations lays out the ‘Procedure before industrial tribunal’ and s.2(a) states that schemes used to appraise jobs should not discriminate on grounds of sex.
The legislation brought many millions more women into the scope of the legislation by weakening the impact of gender segregation on the right to equal pay. However, the legislation added a great deal of complexity to both the legal concept of equal pay and to the practicalities of implementing it in the workplace. This is evidenced by the need by the tribunals to use independent experts to establish whether there is equivalence between different job roles, the number of equal value cases at industrial/employment tribunal and the length of time they take to complete, which can be many years. The legislation still contains some remaining limitations in relation to requiring an actual (rather than hypothetical) male comparator who must be employed at the same establishment.