NLC Update (15/05/15)

The picture regarding equal pay and the GMB union in North Lanarkshire is becoming clearer by the day and it does indeed seem to be correct that the GMB restricted the equal pay claims of its members to only three years, i.e. for the so-called protection period under the 1997 Single Status Agreement.

I am also told that the equal pay original grievance raised by the GMB related to the period 4 November 2006 to 5 November 2009 which is another mystery because that would seem to be a different timescale to everyone else (see North Lanarkshire Update of 14 May 2015)  

At the moment GMB members are not being made any settlement offers at all which I imagine must be very demoralising and frustrating for the 500 or so members involved. 

Nor do the union's actions make any sense, to me at least, because Action 4 Equality Scotland has been arguing since 2007 that the new JES scheme in North Lanarkshire was fundamentally flawed and that the scheme treated male workers more favourably than their female colleagues.

A4ES argued this position at the long-running Employment Tribunal hearing in Glasgow at which the Council was forced to concede that a variety of jobs had not been assessed and graded properly. 

In effect the Council was forced into concessions about the reliability of the JES scheme and this led to the recent settlement with North Lanarkshire Council which runs all the way from January 2007 to 31 March 2015.  

Now if there are around 500 GMB members involved and everyone has 'lost' an average of £5,000 (a conservative figure probably), then this whole business could end up costing GMB members in North Lanarkshire collectively around £2.5 million, perhaps much more.

In my view, the best way out of the situation is for the GMB to guarantee that the union will make good any losses suffered by individual members, because I doubt very much that North Lanarkshire Council will bail them out at this late stage. 

After all the problem appears to have been caused by the GMB's failure to protect its members' interests properly by following Action 4 Equality Scotland's lead and, for once at least, the Council is not to blame.

If the GMB does not step up and give such a guarantee, I suspect the only thing members can do is to take legal action against the union to recover their losses.

So if you have any information to pass on, or even just something to say, then drop me a not (in confidence, of course) to: markirvine@compuserve.com