Witness Statement
Here's the witness statement that I submitted to the Glasgow Employment Tribunal when I gave evidence last year on the North Lanarkshire Council claims.
In responding to questions from Daphne Romney QC, who is acting for the A4ES clients, I made a point of emphasising that money and resources were never the problem in terms of implementing the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement.
Because in the year 2000 the council employers including North Lanarkshire and the Labour led coalition government in the Scottish Parliament introduced a new pay deal for school teachers (the McCrone Agreement) - which cost £800 million a year.
Far more than the £400 to £500 million price tag on the 1999 Single Status Agreement which was aimed at addressing the widespread pay discrimination against women council workers.
Much to my surprise I've not heard the trade unions or Labour politicians like Johann Lamont (a former school teacher) having much to say about the very different way two groups of council workers have been treated.
Which is shamefully, if you ask me.
WITNESS STATEMENT
OF
MARK IRVINE
_________________________________________
I am an independent consultant and work with a wide range of clients across the public, private and voluntary sectors both in the UK and in Europe.
Up until November 1999 I was employed as Unison’s Head of Local Government in Scotland, acting as its Chief Negotiator with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (“COSLA”) and the 32 local authority employers.
I was appointed as Unison’s Head of Local Government in July 1993 when the new union came into being following a merger of its three predecessor organisations: COHSE, NALGO and NUPE.
I acted as the Joint Secretary to the Joint Trade Union Side which negotiated the 1999 Single Status Agreement in Scotland (“the Red Book”). As such, I am very familiar with the thinking behind the Red Book, its terms, purpose and the express understanding of both the employers and trade unions as to its effect; and with the prevailing circumstances which led up to the negotiations.
Prior to 1999, I had acted as the Chair of the Manual Workers Scottish Council and as Joint Secretary to the APT&C Staffs Scottish Council. These two bodies negotiated the terms of the former collective agreements known in Scotland as “the Green Book” for Manual workers and “the Blue Book” for APT&C workers. These two bodies ceased to exist after the Red Book was agreed in 1999. They were replaced by the new Single Table Scottish Joint Council when their respective collective agreements (i.e. the Scottish Green and Blue Books) were superseded by the Red Book Single Status Agreement.
Previously, I had also been a member of the UK National Joint Council for Manual Workers and the UK National Joint Council for APT&C staff: the two bodies which negotiated the original Single Status Agreement in 1997 which applied to the UK other than Scotland.
The Scottish Council was part of the UK National Joint Council, but had a practice and history of varying UK agreements to better suit the needs of the employers and trade unions in Scotland. For example, the Scottish ‘Green Book’ had 8 national core jobs, while the White Book had only 6.
In the case of the Green Book, the principles of the national agreement were exactly the same as the ‘White Book’, but the implementation of the Job Evaluation Scheme in Scotland was much more centralised, strictly controlled and tightly policed by the Joint Secretaries and the SNJC. In fact, Paragraph 1.4 of the Introduction to the Scheme of Pay and Conditions of Service expressly emphasised that the intention of the Green Book agreement was to put in place a set of standard national wage rates covering all manual worker jobs across the whole of Scotland. In other words, a Home Help was to be paid the same and the proper rate for the job from Dumfries to Caithness, Glasgow to Inverness - and on the islands as well as the mainland councils.
These implementation arrangements in Scotland are set out in detail at Paragraphs 3.3, 3.4, 3.5 and 10.1 of the Green Book. Unlike the position in the rest of the UK, the Scottish Green Book effectively controlled the application of the new national agreement and Job Evaluation Scheme at local level.
The UK 1997 Single Status Agreement (also known, confusingly as the Green Book) was subject to further negotiations between the employers and trade unions in Scotland. The new Scottish national agreement was finally adopted (with some differences) as the Red Book in 1999 following membership ballots within Unison, GMB and TGWU (now Unite). The constitution of the new Scottish Joint Council had the effect of removing Scotland from direct involvement in negotiations at UK level. This was a change of historic importance for both the employers and the trade unions.
The aim of Single Status was to end the old divide between ‘blue’ and ‘white’ collar workers by delivering a new and common set of conditions of service which eliminated the historic pay discrimination against women workers. The strategic goal of the trade unions was shared, at the time, by the local government employers – not least because the trade unions had a Plan B. The unions made it clear to the employers that litigation in the courts was a viable option if the collective bargaining machinery failed to deliver the intended outcome.
For their part, the employers accepted at the time that thousands of female workers had valid equal pay claims, as a result of the long standing practice of paying hidden bonuses, but only to traditional male jobs The employers conceded they had no real defence to such claims which is later evidenced by their rush to make settlement offers (albeit unexplained and poor offers) to many council employees in 2005/06. For example, in one of the many negotiating meetings which took place at COSLA over the 1999 Scottish Single Status Agreement the Chair of the Employers’ Side illustrated the scale of the problem by reference to his own local council where the craft workers bonuses were based on the use of out-of-date, hand-held tools whereas the council employer knew fine well that such employees had been using power tools for years. In other words, bonus schemes in these male dominated council jobs were not based on any objective measure of performance or productivity and had become widely discredited in the eyes of both the employers and the trade unions. The remark was made in the context of a wider debate about the challenges of implementing the 1997 UK Single Status Agreement in Scotland and the senior officials on both the Employer and Trade Union Sides were present at the time.
The 1997 Single Status Agreement emerged only after years of painstaking negotiations in the UK negotiating bodies (Manual and APT&C). The employers and trade unions both agreed there was widespread pay discrimination and that the only alternative to litigation was a new national agreement and the introduction of a non-discriminatory JES. Both sides were aware of the Cleveland dinner ladies litigation which resulted in kitchen workers winning a multi million pound settlement after comparing themselves with gardener bonus earners.
The principles underlying the Red Book and the 1997 Single Status Agreement are the same. However, in Scotland there was an express timetable for the introduction of the JES, which was not present in the 1997 Single Status Agreement as originally agreed. The reason for this in Scotland was to ensure that the JES scheme was introduced at a proper pace and within a clear time frame. The Scottish employers initially agreed to develop a Scotland wide JES via COSLA and this required extensive consultation amongst the employers and separately with the trade unions.
The Red Book has been in operation since 1999. It was provided in the Red Book that its conditions would be expressly referred to for new starters from July 1999 onwards as per paragraph 5 of the Red Book Implementation Agreement:
"Where contracts of employment incorporate Scottish agreements, references to the former APT&C or Manual Worker agreements will now be to the new Red Book. Employees need to be notified accordingly, on an individual basis at a suitable opportunity".
Having adopted its own Single Status Agreement in 1999, the trade unions and council employers had committed themselves to a timetable of 3 years for introducing a completely new and non-discriminatory Job Evaluation scheme.
The proposed vehicle for this task (Gauge) was a bespoke JE scheme, one chosen deliberately and only after the local authority employers spent £250,000 of public money road testing the scheme to ensure it was fit for purpose. All 32 Scottish councils supported the Red Book national agreement and the development of the Gauge JE scheme – with larger councils paying more towards the costs on a per capita (employee) basis.
The Gauge scheme was based on clear, transparent principles and agreed to adopt the Code of Good Practice from the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), as well as rigorous statistical techniques for analysing and assessing pay outcomes – including a Rank Order of Jobs to assess the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pay outcomes for key male and female job groups (i.e. after the Job Evaluation exercise had taken place).
The nationally recommended JE scheme has 13 factors against which all jobs are assessed against an agreed and detailed Job Description. The 13 factors have various levels; lowest = 1, highest = 9. The factor levels are defined in the accompanying guidance, so that people can understand how their own job and other jobs have been assessed. Individual jobs are awarded a score under each of the factor headings and the factors are weighted to produce a final score and a rank order of jobs.
A Scoring Matrix accompanies the nationally recommended JE scheme to make the whole process transparent, understandable and user friendly. Under the national scheme, the rank order of jobs is used to create a local pay and grading structure by plotting the JE scores against the nationally agreed Spinal Column of pay points.
For reasons only the employers can explain, councils began dragging their feet on Job Evaluation and failed to tackle the hidden bonus regime. The original 2002 deadline for JES came and went, only to be replaced by a further 2 year extension until 2004. By then the original agreement had been allowed to drift and there was no sign of either the trade unions or the local authority employers having the political to tackle the widespread pay discrimination – which they had both promised to sweep away in 1999.
In other words the old male-only bonus culture was alive despite all the fine words and absolute commitment to equal pay that was right at the heart of 1997 and 1999 Single Status Agreements. I was Head of Local Government for Unison and local regional officers reported to me. I therefore had knowledge of the nature of these “bonuses”. The officers reporting to me were in no doubt that these bonuses would not withstand scrutiny under the Red Book. Productivity bonuses, whatever they might have been in years past, were simply attendance allowances and were not linked to productivity. No such bonus or allowance was offered to female groups.
In relation to pay protection arrangements I would observe that the 1999 Red Book (Paragraph 20) provided for a period of three years protection on a ‘cash conserved’ basis. The expert and legal advice given to the Trade Union side during the Single Status negotiations was that a longer period of pay protection would have been unsustainable and open to challenge as discriminatory because pay protection arrangements were likely to apply to predominantly male jobs within the workforce.
Pay protection was not really an issue for female dominated council jobs because, as a rule, these jobs were generally excluded from bonus arrangements. The only example I can recall, personally, of a bonus scheme being extended to women workers came about in Edinburgh District Council in 2002/03 during negotiations over the Council’s Leisure Services Contract. A bonus scheme of 15% was in place at the time I became involved in these negotiations (on behalf of NUPE at the time), but the scheme applied only to full-time employees (all of whom were male) and specifically excluded all part-time employees (all of whom were female). I explained that this was a discriminatory practice, unlawful and wide open to challenge which the Council management finally accepted after seeking legal advice. In the end the bonus scheme was amended to apply to all employees regardless of hours worked and the bonus level was actually increased to 25% of basic pay.
In relation to bonus earnings I would observe that the Red Book at Paragraph 21 states that while bonus schemes “may not in themselves be discriminatory provided they meet real business objectives and access is available to all”.
To my knowledge North Lanarkshire did not extend any of its bonus schemes to female dominated groups, so the pay discrimination that the Red Book had promised to end simply became entrenched in the new post-Red Book pay arrangements. North Lanarkshire’s bonus schemes, like other councils, were not linked to productivity or real business objectives and had become widely regarded as attendance allowances, i.e. the men’s pay did not fluctuate to any significant extent and was paid for simply attending work.
In 1999 I was not aware of any proposals within individual councils to consolidate bonus payments into basic pay pre-implementation, although such a measure had been discussed previously but flatly rejected within the Trade Union Side. For the obvious reason that this would have entrenched the underlying pay discrimination and continued the practice of treating the women workers (and women members) much less favourably than the men.
Signed: ........................... Mark Irvine....................................................
