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Caught between a rock and a hard place

Nov 7 2007

Coun Alan Rudge

IT’S no surprise that Birmingham council workers are threatening strike action over a pay deal that will leave 8,000 of them worse off.

Yet Alan Rudge, the cabinet member who had the unenviable job of stitching together the new wage structure, isn’t the villain of the piece.

He’s been thrown into the brown sticky stuff by a government which insisted the council had to eliminate pay discrimination between men and women – but then refused to fund the change.

That meant, in practice, that one worker's rise is another one's cut. Poor old Rudge has been forced to rob Peter to pay Paula.

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