North Lanarkshire Update
A number of readers have been in touch to ask what's happening with the review of certain North Lanarkshire jobs which was agreed as part of the overall settlement on equal pay.
Now I don't know to be honest because this is an area where the trade unions in NLC were supposed to be taking the lead, but as far as I can see there has been no information published in the Council's website or by any of the trade unions involved in the process.
Which is odd since job evaluation is supposed to be an open and transparent process - one that the workforce can have real confidence in, especially after all the 'mistakes' and 'errors' from previous years.
Maybe this post on the blog site will help stimulate a debate and encourage people to flush things out by asking questions of the trade unions via their Facebook pages.
NLC Update (27/04/15)
As regular readers know I fought a long Freedom of Information (FoI) battle with North Lanarkshire Council (NLC) in order to discover more about the Equality Impact Assessment (EIA) which was carried out before the Council finally implemented new pay arrangements in January 2007.
Now the Equality Impact Assessment had been demanded by the trade unions and the terms of reference were agreed with the trade unions via the Council's head of human resources, Iris Wylie.
The declared purpose of the EIA was, of course, to ensure that all jobs were treated fairly and that the principle of 'equal pay for work of equal value' was at the heart of the new pay arrangements which flowed from the Council's job evaluation scheme (JES).
As everyone now knows, this is not what happened and the new pay arrangements favoured traditional male jobs which is astonishing if you ask me, especially as the simple common sense test of looking at the 'rank order' of jobs would have shown that many predominantly female jobs had lost out during the whole JES process.
I will have more to say about this issue in the days ahead because NLC will have to review the grades of various Council jobs and if you ask me, it is essential that this further process is conducted in a completely transparent manner.
So that NLC employees can see what's going on for themselves and understand how the current failings of the JES are to be addressed, otherwise there's a very real risk of things being done behind closed doors and without proper scrutiny which is precisely what happened before, of course.
More on this subject to follow.
