Withholding labour

Emily Maitlis is still promoting her book, Airhead, and has given a slightly more detailed interview to the South China Morning Post, about going on 'strike' over fair pay for election coverage, and how much the "Over-£150k list" helped her negotiations with BBC News management.....

“I knew that, erm, for example, Jeremy Vine and I were literally doing the same job [during election coverage]. I was standing in front of a touch screen, he was in front of a [virtual-reality screen] and we were doing the same job with the same preparation. And there was a massive disparity in salaries.”

Did Vine tell her this?

“Erm, well, I knew. No. Funnily enough, a colleague on the team said: ‘You’ve got to sort this out.’ And I went in and tried, and I got told it couldn’t be sorted out.”

After a couple more questions, Maitlis drops her defences, revealing for the first time, “I … I went on strike actually. I just went on strike. I was like, I’m just going to quietly stay away until you sort out the contract, because it seemed like a more efficient way of doing things. I never made a big deal of it, never told anyone, it was just between me and them.”

How long did her industrial action last? “It was very quick actually – slightly too quick,” she says, with a wry smile – still clearly amazed at how it could be resolved seemingly only with the prospect of the publication of figures the BBC had fought so hard not to disclose. “You know, sunlight and disinfectant and all that sort of stuff. What’s that amazing phrase; most people don’t work against their interests if they don’t have to.”

It is this issue that will have Maitlis stirring at 3am to clarify. She’ll send me an email explaining she had been offered equal pay “literally days before the list”, but “I was slightly sceptical as you can imagine – and I didn’t want to suddenly appear on the list as if the gender pay gap had never happened”. She received “an extraordinarily generous” and “quite faith-restoring” phone call from colleague Evan Davis “where he basically said, ‘This is all wrong and we must put it right’”. She considered another job offer and bided her time “until after the list emerged – without me on it – and I could think about things more clearly”.

Her salary has now been raised to £229,999, making her the joint highest paid woman at BBC News.