Job Evaluation 1 (06/12/07)

Hands up! 

How many employees of North Lanarkshire Council believe that their new Job Evaluation Scheme (JES) has been applied fairly, consistently and in a manner that rewards people properly for the jobs they do?

Well, very few it seems if our feedback is anything to go by - probably just the senior managers whose jobs were conveniently left outside the scope of the JES - and of course the local union reps who negotiated and urged members to accept the scheme when it was first proposed. 

Take the lowest grade in the new pay structure - NLC 1 - as it has been imaginatively called.

By a truly amazing coincidence this grade has been solely and exclusively reserved for the job of Cleaner - needless to say a job done overwhelmingly by low paid women workers.

Now a Cleaner does a very important job - as do many other council employees - including Road Sweepers which, as everyone knows, is a traditional male and bonus earning job.

Before North Lanarkshire's allegedly fairer JES - Cleaners and Road Sweepers were on exactly the same grade - Manual Worker (MW) 1 in old money.

But after the JES (for reasons no one can explain) - the male Road Sweepers have been awarded the higher grade of NLC 2 - while all the women Cleaners have ended up at the bottom of the heap on NLC 1.

Something smells very fishy here - how can that possibly happen - without a good old fashioned bit of jiggery pokery?

Because the job of a Cleaner is hard, heavy work - no less arduous certainly than a Road Sweeper - and arguably the Cleaner carries more responsibility for ensuring high standards in important public areas - school toilets, for example.

So, how can Cleaners possibly end up on the lowest grade - with no male group to keep them company? The answer is that the council has engineered the results to keep the costs of equal pay down. 

But it was never intended to work that way - Single Status was supposed to be fairer to many of the female dominated jobs which had been undervalued and underpaid for years.

What should people do? They should appeal their grades - demand to see the detailed scores of other male jobs - and register an equal pay claim, if they've not already done so.

If the unions had any guts, they'd be lodging mass appeals on behalf of all North Lanarkshire Cleaners - but the unions are really part of the problem, as many ordinary members now realise. 

More to follow - Job Evaluation 2 coming soon!