Unfair pay and employment law in one-off drama.

It is fair to say that BBC2’s airing of Simon Bent and Philippa Lowthorpe’s drama Sex, the City and Me was the stimulus of some fascinating debating material that has been thrown around the YouClaim office in the past week. The one-off drama starring Cutting It’s [italics] Sarah Parish raised more than a few prominent issues concerning employment law which are representative of both a changing world and a changing workplace.Centring on the story of an ambitious female investment banker that falls pregnant at the pinnacle of her career, the powerful drama shows the struggle against bullying and harassment at work, which many women in the UK face today.Jess (Parish) is the one that lands the big investors and manages a highly successful team but an insight into the barriers she faces as a female employee are first signalled when she receives a fraction of the bonus that one of her male underlings receives.

Everyone is stunned when high-flyer Jess announces she is pregnant but her Machiavellian boss (Ben Miles) is hot on the case to find a replacement, whether she decides to return to work after her maternity leave or not. The fact is Jess can’t wait to get back to the office but when she returns everything is not quite as it ought to be. She is faced with having someone else sitting at her desk, having had her client base distributed amongst her colleagues so that she has to build up a new one from scratch, having had her responsibility as team manager taken away and receiving an even smaller bonus than before. Jess is quick to realise that she is being managed out of the business and, realising her rights regarding employment law, she decides to make a compensation claim.She seeks out the expertise of a solicitor who will fight to get her the compensation she deserves and she finds Ruth, played by Sarah Lancashire. Ruth warns Jess that she shouldn’t trust anyone at work while she tries to gather evidence for her tribunal. The reality of this comes to light when Jess realises that she has been abandoned by her colleagues who will not help her for love nor money for fear of ending up in a similar position.

Eventually, after extreme stress at work, being dismissed from her job, suffering the breakdown of her marriage and almost giving up on the court case, Jess gains the evidence she needs from the office cleaner, allowing her to prove her case and win her compensation claim. Anyone who watched the drama would surely agree that this gripping and compelling piece of television really took the bull of sexual discrimination in the workplace and employment law by the horns. This comes at a time when it has just been revealed in the news that women in the public sector are taking more than 1,500 equal pay cases to court a month. It has been reported that, so far, over 10,000 compensation claims have been made in the health sector and five times as many have been made in local government.

Many of these claims have been sought under the no win, no fee agreement and settlements have ranged from £10,000 to £300,000. With the help of in-depth interviews with women who had previously fought major employment law cases in London, Sex the City and Me explored issues of sexual harassment, gender discrimination, unequal pay, pregnancy and parental discrimination and revealed that in some instances the glass ceiling is still very firmly in place.