North Lanarkshire Update
More readers have been in touch over the weekend regarding North Lanarkshire Council's late-running job evaluation (JE) review.
Now according to my sources within the Council there appears to be a deliberate attempt underway to revisit some of the information already gathered by the so-called 'Evaluation Team' which has the task of assessing various aspects of the jobs included in the review.
Why this should be done a second time is a mystery, but it certainly doesn't look good and if you ask me it's high time the unions stepped in and put a stop to this nonsense of managers shadowing Home Carers - because managers are not trained in job evaluation techniques.
So what it looks like is an calculated effort to 'talk down' aspects of the Home Carers jobs which in turn could affect their scores and grading under the job evaluation scheme (JES).
Regular readers will recall that this is exactly what happened before in 2006/07 and as Home Carers are the biggest single group involved in the exercise certainly it looks as if someone is trying to manipulate the outcome of the review.
If the Home Carers are the only group being singled out for this 'special' treatment, then the whole thing looks even more fishy and that's why, as I've said before, a professional job evaluation exercise should always be conducted in an open and transparent manner.
The best thing the trade unions could do now, if you ask me, would be to publish the JE information that's been gathered so far, because at the moment the NLC workforce is being kept in the dark - and that's not good.
