Glasgow - Number Crunching

Stefan Cross QC explains the background to the 'number crunching' which is now underway in connection with the pay data supplied by Glasgow City Council. 

Up till now A4ES has been working with incomplete and inadequate information, so it's been a bit like doing a jigsaw with only half the pieces and all the corner pieces missing.

The situation is beginning to improve, but slowly and I think it's fair to say that we're a long way from being out of the woods yet.

So keep your eye on the blog site because there's no room for complacency until the job is completed.

   

IT AIN'T EASY CRUNCHING NUMBERS

there have been quite a few posts from folk suggesting that working out what they are “due” should be easy. Just take comparators hourly rate and deduct claimants hourly rate and hey presto.

Oh that it were so. Unfortunately not.

First some numbers from the incomplete data so far received.

There are 302 separate columns for every single person representing 302 individual pay codes. There are 12 lines for each year so 3624 individual pieces of pay data for each comparator. There are at least 156 comparators so 565344 pieces of pay data just for the comparators.

There are 10000 claimants many with multiple jobs, both concurrent and consecutive or both. Every person is different. Because of NSWP and WCD even people with same jobs have different pay. Some people have multiple contracts for the same job. The results are different if you combine them or take them separately. What about 2 different jobs plus more than one contract totalling over 35hours?

Of those 302 pay categories we have to remove non gendered pay. What is an is or is not non gendered has to be agreed. Eg normally overtime is not gendered but here it most definitely is.

Then working out which comparator is the best for which job is a massive task. Some of those pay elements are better for some jobs but not others. Some people doing same job might want different comparators eg based on whether they do or do not do overtime/work more than 35 hours.

Then there’s EDC and the job changes. The council has so far failed to be open about what happened. Men were either promoted or regarded. Can you still use him if he’s now a higher grade? This is an issue being appealed by another council in England.

Only when we’ve navigated all this can we even get hourly rates which have to be agreed.

Conclusion: as the song goes - it ain’t easy it’s heavy, or something like that


Stefan