Alex Tabarrok: Britain's equal pay madness

Britain’s ‘equal value’ pay rules go well beyond upholding equal pay for the same work, and mean that tribunals have the power to ignore the market and decide that bin men and teaching assistants should, in fact, be paid the same. These rules bankrupted Birmingham City Council, and the big supermarkets are already facing claims worth up to £8 billion for back pay. Now the Government wants to expand the law further, adding race and disability to the list of grounds on which you can bring a claim. Alex Tabarrok, Professor of Economics at George Mason University and co-founder of the blog Marginal Revolution wrote a viral post in 2024 on Britain’s ‘Orwellian’ approach to equal value pay. He walks CapX editor Marc Sidwell through the madness of trying to rule by committee on how to treat apples and oranges the same, and explains why trying to set a just price is like suing the weather. He says we’ve somehow ended up in the worst of all worlds: instead of the old Marxist fantasy of a scientific bureaucracy making economic decisions, we have a tribunal system everyone can see is broken, spending years and generating hundreds of pages of documents to produce nonsensical outcomes. Tabarrok argues our pay rules are part of a much bigger pattern: well-intentioned rules piling up like pebbles in a stream, until the stream – the economy, innovation and growth – is dammed. And sometimes only a sharp rap on the head from reality can restore policymakers to their senses. Get full access to The CapX Briefing at briefing.capx.co/subscribe