Stop Press!

A reader from North Lanarkshire has been in touch to say that she has received ballot papers from her trade union about a new pay and grading structure within the Council.

Now I haven't seen the documents as yet, but I find it highly suspicious that a trade union should be conducting a ballot about new pay arrangements and term-time arrangements when there are so many issues unresolved from the ongoing Employment Tribunal.

If you ask me, the timing is also completely mad as the schools are now breaking-up for the summer holidays which means that people are unable to discuss what's going on at their workplaces, as normal. 

I am making arrangements to see these papers although if anyone can scan and email them to me, that would help speed things up - markirvine@compuserve.com

In the meantime, if I were a trade union member in North Lanarkshire I would certainly not be voting to support or bring in any new changes at this pint in time. 

Instead I would insist that the Council is required to explain how it intends to settle all the outstanding equal pay claims and address the evident failings in its job evaluation scheme (JES) which have been exposed so brutally at the ongoing Employment Tribunal.

Remember the Employment Tribunal has only been suspended to allow settlement discussions to take place and will start up again in late August/September 2014 if agreement is not reached.  

Job Evaluation (23 June 2014)

The time has come in North Lanarkshire to start calling a spade a spade and the reality is that senior Council officials have let down their lowest paid staff.

So what's the evidence?

Well the evidence is that back in 2004 a report on bonus was discussed by the Council's Job Evaluation Steering Group (JESG), on which the trade unions were represented, and this report showed that bonus earnings were effectively impossible to defend because they were not linked to productivity and were paid only to traditional male groups of workers. It showed that most bonus earnings were, not all. Many were not linked to productivity at all, some were but on outdated values.

Although this was already widely accepted, of course, and the issue of bonus earnings had been at the heart of the negotiations which led to Scotland's 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement.

For some groups in North Lanarkshire, for example refuse workers, the bonus was as high as 60% which meant that although these jobs were on a lower grades than a Home Support Worker (who was on the Manual Worker 5 grade) they would end up earning more. For example, if a Refuse Driver (on MW Grade 4 was earning £6.00 an  hour, the effect of the bonus was to raise their hourly rate to £9.60 an hour - way above the Home Support Worker.

But this £3.60 pay gap could not be justified because the male jobs were on lower grades than the women's jobs. HSWs were actually being paid on APT&C salary scales from 1999 but the Council had conceded the 'old' Manual Worker job evaluation stood and the difference in earnings could not be explained away by any suggestion that the male groups were somehow working harder than the women.

Now if the women's pay had been brought into line with the men's, as it should have been under the 1999 Agreement, then we wouldn't be still be arguing about equal pay in North Lanarkshire today.

Yet we are because what the Council has done is to manipulate the pay arrangements for its male groups of workers. For example, the male groups assimilated on to the new pay structures at their existing salary including bonus. In many cases the bonus had already been consolidated into basic pay before Single Status came into effect

In other words the old differences in pay remain broadly intact, but are now obscured or hidden from sight even though the job evaluation (JE) process and the pay arrangements that flow from JE ought to be handled in an open and transparent manner, so that the workforce can have real confidence in the outcomes.

Now I've just spoken to a chap in North Lanarkshire who has a pay slip from a Refuse Collector which under the old pre-2006 grading scheme was Manual Worker 2 - three grades below that of a Home Support Worker on Manual Worker 5.

Yet the pay slip of this Refuse Collector, who was on a much lower MW grade, now shows an hourly rate of £9.8242 that would have included overtime. In 2005 MW2 got £5.86 an hour and Refuse Collectors got 60% bonus

So just how is it that this male job has managed to leapfrog right over the Home Support Worker when just plain, old-fashioned common sense and the obvious demands of the job tells you that this simply isn't right?

A good question, if you ask me and one which points to the JE process in North Lanarkshire being manipulated to produce a desired outcome.

Remember that HSWs ended up (after their marks were changed in 2005) as NLC 2 and NLC 3 (HSW1 and HSW2 respectively). But of course HSW2 went to the bottom of the grade and Refuse Collectors to the top and got pay protection on top of that. 

To add insult to injury HSWs were originally graded at NLC 3 and 4 (in 2005) but the Council initiated a 'review' of their working environment mark and the HSWs lost 10 points each as they were suddenly deemed not to be exposed to incontinence. 

So, unbelievably, if you ask me HSWs now get 1 (the lowest mark possible and the same as an offices worker), but the Council defended this position until 30 days into the Employment Tribunal hearing before conceding this was wrong - without anyone accepting responsibility for what has happened.  

From July 2009 (6 months before their 3-year pay protection ran out), Refuse Collectors were re-evauated to take account of their new duties enforcing recycling and checking bins and became NLC 4 wiping out the pay protection element.

So Refuse Collectors were already better paid than HSW1 because they were always on a higher grade, but were also paid more than HSW2 because they were assimilated to the top of the grade while HSW2s went to the bottom.

Either way it's a strange old world when a demanding and highly responsible job like that of Home Support Worker is worth less than that of a Refuse Collector.

Who Guards the Guards? (23 June 2014)

I'm told by a highly reliable source that one of the many revelations to emerge from the ongoing Employment Tribunal against North Lanarkshire Council is that senior managers ordered the destruction of important paperwork about the Council's job evaluation scheme (JES).

Now this is shocking on a whole number of counts.

First of all, the new JES was the most significant human resource issue to be dealt with in a generation and senior officials within the Council were well aware of the importance of keeping efficient and accurate records detailing how different jobs were scored and graded by the JES process.

Secondly, the outcomes of the Council's JES was already being vigorously challenged in the Employment Tribunal and so to destroy vital evidence when litigation was underway looks to be a deliberate act - an attempt to bury the evidence, if you like.

Thirdly, in this modern day and age absolutely no one, especially one of Scotland's largest councils, would be dumb enough not to 'back up' important records on a hard disk to keep them safe and secure for future reference.

So the big questions for senior officials within North Lanarkshire to answer are:

1. Exactly which records have been destroyed?
2. Which jobs have been affected?      
3. When was this instruction issued and by whom?
4. Why were the paper records not backed up?
5. Who is being held accountable and in what way for this shocking mess?

And you would think that local politicians would take these points up, on a cross party and all party basis, and help get to the bottom of exactly what has been going on. 

Snakes and Ladders (23 June 20140

North Lanarkshire Council has responded to my recent Freedom of Information (FoI) request by providing the following details on the hourly rates of traditional male council jobs.

Now these jobs were all in receipt of 'bonuses' worth up to 60% of basic pay, but these extra payments were never extended to women's jobs despite the Council's obligations under equality legislation and the requirements of the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement.

In addition, the declared pay scale of these jobs may not reflect accurately what the men were actually paid compared to the women because 'pay protection' may have resulted in the men being paid above the official pay scale.

Another practice which is gradually coming to light is that the male jobs all seem to have been assimilated at the top of the pay scale while the women's jobs went to the bottom of the scale. 

In a bizarre version of snakes and ladders, but one in which only the women's jobs landing on the pay equivalent of a snake.

What's amazing is that before the Council's introduced a new Job Evaluation Scheme (JES) in 2006 a Home Support Worker was on a higher old grade (Manual Worker Grade 5) than all of the male jobs on the list. 

I wonder what odds you would get on that?

Job Title	Minimum Hourly Rate	Maximum Hourly Rate
Road Sweeper Grade - NLC02	£6.8341	£8.3967
Refuse Collector Grade - NLC03	£7.2923	£9.1269
Gardener 1 Grade - NLC04	£8.6093	£9.7269
Gardener 2 Grade – NLC04	£8.6093	£9.7269
Gardener 3 Grade – NLC05	£8.9637	£10.2330
Refuse Driver/Gravedigger/ Gardener 4/Driver 2 Grade – NLC06	£9.5440	£11.0769
Driver 1 Grade – NLC04	£8.6093	£9.7269
Labourer/Store man Grade – NLC 02	£6.8341	£8.3967