The latest news from Berlin is a masterpiece of modern moral theatre: a legal fight for equal pay for disabled workers. The plaintiff, a woman with multiple sclerosis, argues that her employer, a Berlin publisher, pays her less than non-disabled colleagues. She invokes the UK’s Equalities Act as a model. This is not a story about justice. It is a story about the cult of equality and the war on merit.
Let us be clear: no decent person wishes to see disabled workers exploited. But the assumption that all wage disparities are evidence of discrimination is a symptom of intellectual decadence. It reduces the complex calculus of labour value to a simple arithmetic of identity. The publisher claims the pay difference reflects lower productivity due to the plaintiff’s reduced hours and slower output. This is not bigotry. It is economics.
Consider the historical parallel: the late Roman Empire, where the state mandated equal pay for every citizen regardless of skill, bankrupting the treasury and destroying incentives for excellence. The result was a bureaucratic nightmare and a collapse of public virtue. We are now replicating this folly, but with a carapace of human rights language that makes it seem noble.
The UK Equalities Act, which these campaigners hold up as a sacred text, is a monument to bureaucratic overreach. It forces employers to justify every penny of difference, turning workplaces into legal minefields. The cost of compliance falls on small businesses, which are the backbone of any healthy economy. The result is not equality, but stagnation.
Germany’s disabled workers deserve respect, not a patronising charade that treats them as victims. They deserve jobs that match their capabilities, not a system that demands equal pay for unequal output. The real discrimination lies in denying the reality of human difference. We are all not the same, and pretending otherwise is a cruelty of the highest order.
Let us look at the numbers. In the UK, since the Equalities Act passed in 2010, the employment rate for disabled people has barely budged. Meanwhile, litigation has exploded. It is a festival of lawyers and a funeral for common sense. The German court would do well to heed this warning. Instead, it seems poised to embrace a legal framework that treats employers as villains and disabled workers as perpetual children.
If the plaintiff wins, expect a cascade of similar claims. Expect German companies to outsource jobs or automate them away. Expect a new layer of bureaucracy that does nothing to help the disabled but does much to enrich the legal profession. This is not progress. It is the slow death of a productive society.
I am Arthur Penhaligon, and I say this: equal pay for equal work is a fine principle. But when equal work is defined by the state rather than the market, we slide into serfdom. The disabled workers of Germany should demand better jobs, not better entitlements. And the courts should stop playing god with the economy.
