Fife Council Update (18/08/15)
The outstanding equal pay claims against Fife Council are starting to heat up and the good news is that Daphne Romney QC is leading the case on behalf of AES clients.
Regular readers will know that Daphne drove a proverbial coach and horses through the 'defences' put up by North Lanarkshire Council in the Glasgow Employment Tribunal recently which resulted in the Council's case collapsing in a heap.
Now I expect the same thing to happen in Fife where management appear to have adopted a similar strategy to the Labour-run councils North Lanarkshire and South Lanarkshire.
The trade unions in Fife have remarkably little to say on the subject publicly, but my sources tell me that 'new' pay arrangements introduced in 2007 just ended up reinforcing rather than eliminating the historical pay differences between male and female jobs.
As I've said before on the blog site, the process of job evaluation in some Scottish councils can be compared to a game of snakes and ladders - one where all the traditional male jobs end up landing on a ladder while all the female dominated jobs land on a snake.
So when the shooting starts I would be prepared for:
- Women's jobs being concentrated at the bottom of the pay ladder
- Job evaluation scores and grades being manipulated to achieve a predetermined outcome
- Traditional male jobs leapfrogging female dominated jobs without a convincing explanation
Now the exact same thing happened in Labour-run North Lanarkshire which is a bizarre coincidence, don't you think?
Or maybe not.
Because in this day of digital record keeping, public authorities have a clear duty to maintain a detailed audit trail when it comes to making such important, life-changing decisions.
