Hourly Pay Rates

Here's a previous post to the blog site which highlights the importance of hourly rates of pay - as part of an open and transparent approach to equal pay.

When pay is expressed only as an annual salary - the job of understanding what people are paid and why is made more difficult - especially for part-time and term-time workers, the vast majority of whom are women of course.   

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.