League Tables

I said the other day that 'league tables' are, generally speaking, a good thing - because they provide ordinary people with information that public bureaucrats would otherwise keep to themselves.

Take equal pay, for example.

How easy would it be for workers to see and understand what's going on if pay league tables were published routinely? - while protecting the identity of individuals, of course.  

Now that's what should have happened in councils across Scotland - including South Lanarkshire - which would rather people were not in a position to understand easily how local pay structures operate.

One of the simplest, yet most effective, safeguards when carrying out Job Evaluation is to construct a 'before' and 'after' league table of jobs, so that everyone can see - literally at a glance - where one job or group of jobs stands in relation to another.

So simple, so easy and so effective - yet the Council and trade unions in South Lanarkshire have never bothered to publish this information.

Which tells its own story.
  

Hourly Pay Rates (7 September 2013)

I've had quite a few queries recently about the significance of hourly pay rates.

Why don't we just use the old  weekly pay rates or monthly ones or annual salaries for that matter? - is the kind of question that I get asked on a regular basis.

Well, the straight answer is that employers can hide all kinds of things by using a multiplicity of pay rates - weekly, monthly and annual.

Because it's a bit like comparing apples and oranges - just what the hell does it all mean?

Especially when an employer has lots of part-time and term-time workers - as this can make  it very difficult to compare and contrast the true value of different jobs.

But with an all inclusive hourly rate you don't have that problem - it's easy to compare one job with another because what you're looking at is the value placed on that job - for doing one single hour of work.

So, the differences between part-time workers and full-time workers disappear - for pay purposes at least - as do the differences between term time workers and those employed for 52 weeks a year.

Which means that a Spinal Pay Column based on hourly rates of pay is a good thing - generally speaking.

The key point is that a Spinal Pay Column of hourly rates is much more transparent and easy to understand - who is paid what and why - unless of course and employer tries to conceal this information from the workforce.

Combined with a 'rank order' of jobs - shorthand for a pay league table of pay rates - this would make any pay anomalies stand out like a sore thumb - which is what's finally happening in South Lanarkshire Council after all these years - albeit slowly and without any help from the trade unions.