BRITAIN’S BIGGEST union yesterday launched a campaign for equal pay on behalf of up to a million women who work for local

BRITAIN’S BIGGEST union yesterday launched a campaign for equal pay on behalf of up to a million women who work for local authorities It could cost the Government hundreds of millions of pounds. Unison, the public service union, warned that while it wanted to close the “massive gulf” in pay by negotiation, it would also resort to court action.
After years of campaigning, employees’ representatives said yesterday that women were prepared to be patient, “but they can’t wait for ever”.A leading lawyer working for the union calculated that the practice of paying bonuses to employees in male- dominated occupations, but not to those where women were in the majority could cost local authorities up to a billion pounds. The union believes that some authorities could be driven into bankruptcy if they adopted the payment but they argued that the total figure could be kept down through negotiation.The union has recently backed four cases on behalf of school-meals workers and nursery nurses, which cost local authorities more than pounds 20m in compensation and back pay. There are half a dozen more cases in the pipeline and the union says there will be others unless ministers devote substantial funds to deal with the problem.Heather Wakefield, Unison national officer, said: “We want the Government to recognise that inequality in pay is a very serious problem. Money needs to be made available to local authorities to rectify the anomaly. We would prefer to negotiate, but the Government and local authorities should be in no doubt that ultimately we will take court action.”Local government is the single biggest employer of women in Britain – of the 1.4 million employees, nearly one million are female.

Among the groups involved in the drive for equality are home-care workers, secretaries, typists, clerks, school-meals workers, nursery nurses, cleaning staff and care assistants. The union estimates that women in local authorities earn only 78 per cent of the amount paid to male colleagues.. ALANA ROBERTSON has the household responsibilities of someone twice her age. She is the type of young carer the Government is worried about. At 13, she cooks and cleans and helps look after her 10-year-old brother, William, because her divorced mother, Susan, has osteoarthritis and diabetes and cannot lift anything heavy.
“Alana has had to grow up quicker than her time,” Ms Robertson said.Alana claims not to mind, because she loves her mother. But she admits sometimes it is hard.”I do quite a lot,” she said from their home near Kilmarnock. She makes her brother’s breakfast and dinner and puts him to bed All the effort makes it difficult sometimes to study.

If she cannot find time for her homework in the evenings, she gets up at 6.30am to do it.”I sometimes feel I’m missing out on life,” she said. “Most people don’t normally do as much as I do around the house and they go out. I just sit in most of the time.”Ms Robertson, 37, feels guilty Alana does so much but is trapped by her own immobility Their only support is a cleaner for two hours a week “Sometimes I wish Alana would let go the reins .. a bit But she feels that she has always got to be there She worries.”. MICHAEL FRAYN’S Copenhagen, which opened last year at the National, is busy collecting every gong in sight. It has already swept up the Evening Standard and the Critic’s Circle awards for best drama. The play’s transfer now to the West End, with the same consummate cast (David Burke, Sara Kestelman, and Matthew Marsh) confirms the justice of all this praise. One of the play’s great virtues is its absolute purity of focus; it trains its lens on three characters who are still arguing, in limbo beyond the grave, about what really transpired when the German nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg made a mysterious, fateful and inconclusive visit to his former teacher and mentor, Niels Bohr, in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen in 1941.

Was his mission to warn Bohr of the German atomic bomb programme or to try to recruit him for it?
The play’s austere concentration was heightened in the Cottesloe by placing the action on a bare circular set with part of the audience sitting on steeply raked seats at the back, like jurors. The Duchess Theatre has such an intimate lecture-room atmosphere that similar conditions can be created with amazing ease.Seeing Copenhagen again, I was struck by the powerful way it engages the feelings as well as the intellect, a fact perhaps under-emphasised the first time round. The play is much more than a cerebral thriller about shifting interpretations and the painful ironies that proliferate from the conjunction of pure science and impure Realpolitik.Delicately applying Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the drama develops into a profound and haunting meditation on the mysteries of human motivation. It is also a sad love story of sorts, the older scientist seeking, and then feeling betrayed by, a substitute son.Michael Blakemore’s superb production is beautifully attentive to the play’s recurring rhythms, as this trio endlessly re-enacts that momentous 1941 encounter A demanding and richly rewarding evening.. AS THE solemn procession of world leaders walked past the body of King Hussein yesterday, many must have remembered they had attended a similar ceremony 60 miles away across the Jordan river in Jerusalem just over three years ago

It is an ominous precedent. In 1995, it was King Hussein himself who was among the leading mourners to stand by the coffin of Yitzhak Rabin, the assassinated Israeli prime minister. Yesterday it was his turn to receive the same tributes to a “visionary and peace-maker”.
One Jordanian said nervously that he hoped King Hussein’s political legacy would last longer than Mr Rabin’s.Six months after the latter’s death, Israelis chose Benjamin Netanyahu – a man Mr Rabin detested – to be premier and elected a parliament opposed to peace terms with the Palestinians that Mr Rabin had signed.People in Jordan were flattered by the sight of President Bill Clinton and three former United States leaders at their king’s funeral, along with President Boris Yeltsin of Russia and a host of world figures.In the longer term, however, Jordanians have an acute sense of the vulnerability of their country.

While cameras zoomed in on weeping mourners, the real mood is of anxiety about the future as much as grief for the dead monarch.Jordanians understand that King Hussein never had much room to manoeuvre. He ruled a small country surrounded by more powerful neighbours. When asked once why he had grown a beard, he replied: “I grew it because it’s one of the few decisions I can take without having to ask somebody else if it’s OK to go ahead.”His ceaseless diplomatic activity stemmed from this position of weakness. He needed to insert himself into every problem in the Middle East, win for Jordan an influence it could not command through its own strength, and prevent his country becoming the victim of events it could not control.His dilemma was the same as that of Yasser Arafat, although the king escaped the Palestinian leader’s reputation for untrustworthiness Neither had many political cards in his hand. Both balanced uneasily between the needs of their own people and the demands of outside powers Both switched alliances repeatedly.