North Lanarkshire Update

A kind reader has passed on an 'update' from Unison regarding the review of various jobs agreed as part of the 2015 equal pay settlement with North Lanarkshire Council.

"OB RE-EVALUATION PROJECT UPDATE

"The job re-evaluation for the posts involved in the equal pay litigation is still to be concluded. At this stage all job holders have been interviewed and the team has produced a generic job overview for each post. The overviews were then sent to job holders and managers for sign off or further discussion where they have disagreed with a part of the overview. This process has been time consuming, but UNISON thinks its vital that the new job overviews are as accurate as possible.

"We know that this had been a frustrating time for members, but everyone involved in the process is determined that re-evaluation is done properly.

"We'll keep you updated."

Now as regular readers know, this review was supposed to have been completed months ago, by the end of December 2015.

But not only has another important deadline been missed again by NLC, the review has been shrouded in secrecy, instead being handled in an open and transparent manner which is what a professional Job Evaluation process should be all about.

So the wider workforce has not seen any new job descriptions - not just those of the claimant groups, but the job descriptions of various traditional male jobs which have been the source of thousands of equal pay challenges over the past 11 years.

The $64,000 dollar question being: : "How can an employee (Home Carer, for example) tell if their job is being assessed fairly and consistently, unless they are also able to see how male comparator jobs are treated (council refuse workers, gardeners and so on?"

I wrote about the North Lanarkshire's last job evaluation exercise way back in 2007 and all of my criticisms about the NLC JES were completely vindicated at the long-running Glasgow Employment Tribunal, albeit several years later.

I am re-publishing these posts from the blog site archive which readers in NLC may find interesting.