Council Bombshell (11/03/14)
Well what a day it was yesterday in the Glasgow Employment Tribunal - a momentous day if you ask me, because North Lanarkshire Council (NLC) was finally forced to concede that the gradings awarded to many of its women workers are wrong.
Specifically, the Council has abandoned its defence of the gradings applied to Home Support Workers (Home Carers), School Crossing Patrol Workers and Playground Supervisors - despite arguing for years that the pay and grading of these predominantly female jobs were absolutely fine.
The only way for the Council to rectify the situation is to appoint someone who can evaluate these jobs independently and properly, but that is of course what should have happened many years ago.
Other jobs may follow because the case made by the claimants and by the A4ES barrister, Daphne Romney QC, is that someone has to answer for how this could possibly have been allowed to happen - when so many well paid and senior Council managers were overseeing the process, supposedly to ensure that this was fair to all staff.
The tribunal also heard submissions from Daphne Romney QC which claimed that the way in which the Council assimilated staff on to new grades was discriminatory also - because it favoured all the bonus earning male jobs to the detriment of the women's jobs.
Apparently the Council used the men's bonus earnings to determine their place on the North Lanarkshire pay scale, but only the male jobs received bonus payments which are now accepted as discriminatory because they were effectively part of basic pay and were not related to productivity.
For example, a male worker earning £6.00 per hour plus a 60% bonus (which many of them did) was effectively on an hourly rate of £9.60 an hour - yet a female job on the same grade was assimilated to the NLC pay scale in a much less favourable way by ignoring the impact of the bonus payments.
In other words the women workers should have been put in exactly the same position as the men before the assimilation process took place - because by ignoring the bonus payments (paid only to traditional male jobs) the men received a much better deal than the women.
So if you ask me, the Council's case has turned into something of a dog's dinner and that's not even the end of it because there's also the issue of protection which again seems to have worked in favour of the men - and to the detriment of the women.
The 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement agreed a three year protection period for people who lost out over the new join evaluation arrangements, but for some reason the Council seems to have ignored this provision and the male groups again seem to fare better than their female colleagues.
More details to follow in the days ahead - so watch this space.
Specifically, the Council has abandoned its defence of the gradings applied to Home Support Workers (Home Carers), School Crossing Patrol Workers and Playground Supervisors - despite arguing for years that the pay and grading of these predominantly female jobs were absolutely fine.
The only way for the Council to rectify the situation is to appoint someone who can evaluate these jobs independently and properly, but that is of course what should have happened many years ago.
Other jobs may follow because the case made by the claimants and by the A4ES barrister, Daphne Romney QC, is that someone has to answer for how this could possibly have been allowed to happen - when so many well paid and senior Council managers were overseeing the process, supposedly to ensure that this was fair to all staff.
The tribunal also heard submissions from Daphne Romney QC which claimed that the way in which the Council assimilated staff on to new grades was discriminatory also - because it favoured all the bonus earning male jobs to the detriment of the women's jobs.
Apparently the Council used the men's bonus earnings to determine their place on the North Lanarkshire pay scale, but only the male jobs received bonus payments which are now accepted as discriminatory because they were effectively part of basic pay and were not related to productivity.
For example, a male worker earning £6.00 per hour plus a 60% bonus (which many of them did) was effectively on an hourly rate of £9.60 an hour - yet a female job on the same grade was assimilated to the NLC pay scale in a much less favourable way by ignoring the impact of the bonus payments.
In other words the women workers should have been put in exactly the same position as the men before the assimilation process took place - because by ignoring the bonus payments (paid only to traditional male jobs) the men received a much better deal than the women.
So if you ask me, the Council's case has turned into something of a dog's dinner and that's not even the end of it because there's also the issue of protection which again seems to have worked in favour of the men - and to the detriment of the women.
The 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement agreed a three year protection period for people who lost out over the new join evaluation arrangements, but for some reason the Council seems to have ignored this provision and the male groups again seem to fare better than their female colleagues.
More details to follow in the days ahead - so watch this space.
