What's in a Job?

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 Many were not linked to productivity at all, some were but on outdated values.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.