'Good Faith' vs Council Duplicity (03/12/18)

Action 4 Equality Scotland (A4ES) arrived with a bang in August 2005 and began its task of explaining to low paid, predominantly female, council workers that they were being cheated out of their rights to equal pay.

At first, Glasgow City Council (GCC) denied it had any equal pay problem, yet within months the Council was making 'low ball' offers of settlement to buy-out their employees' claims.

In the run-up to Christmas 2005 large groups of workers were invited to attend 'signing' meetings with senior council managers and supposedly independent lawyers, hand-picked and paid for by GCC.

Workers who signed the 'deal' and gave up their right to take their claim to an Employment Tribunals were given a cash buy-out worth a maximum of £9,000 although many groups  (e.g. clerical staff, child development officers, special needs drivers, janitors etc) were left out altogether, despite having perfectly valid equal pay claims.

At the time, the Council pretended that these 'buy out' offers were really generous, that anyone taking their claim to an Employment Tribunal was taking an enormous risk and that if the workers were 'too greedy' with their demands, the Council could even go bankrupt!

Now this was all scaremongering nonsense, of course, and those who refused to be bullied or intimidated by these tactics, and pursued an equal pay claim with A4ES went on to achieve substantially better financial settlements, albeit after a battle in the Employment Tribunals.  

Yet it now turns out that senior officials knew perfectly well the Council was duping its lowest paid workers out of hundreds of millions of pounds back in 2005, thanks to the following document which has recently come into my possession.

An 'Equal Pay Comparator job analysis' document prepared by external consultants (Link HR Systems) and dated 19 October 2005 states at Page 8:

"The analysis presents a 'worse case scenario' where the highest possible male comparator is used for Equal Pay assessment. The analysis illustrates an annual pay gap of approximately £70 million. On an anticipated 5 years' backdating the potential risk escalates to approximately £351 million"

Except it is quite wrong to say that £351 million was the true extent of the Council's equal pay 'bill' because this figure took no account of overtime hours worked (+20%), other pay enhancements (+20%), interest payments over 5 years (+20%), employer pension contributions (+19%) and those groups of workers who were left out of the calculations (mentioned above) despite having perfectly valid claims (+20%).

So multiplying £351 million by 99% (20% + 20% + 20% + 19% + 20%) equals a grand total of £698 million which is what the Council should have paid in compensation to its workforce before replacing the discriminatory (i.e. pre-WPBR) pay arrangements which had created the problem in the first place.

Instead the Council actually paid out just £24 million in compensation payments although this figure does not include the settlements reached on behalf of A4ES clients, who were a small minority of the total at the time.

But anyway you slice and dice the figures the Council cheated the bulk of its workforce out of something in the region of £650+ million - before adding even more insult to injury by introducing a new WPBR pay scheme in January 2007 which was later condemned (in 2017) as 'unfit for purpose' by Scotland's highest civil court, the Court of Session. 

As regular readers know, senior officials claim that they acted in 'good faith' over the WPBR and that the aim of the scheme was to eliminate gender-based pay discrimination which is one hell of a stretch, if you ask me, especially as the Council is still refusing to make open up its WPBR records and files.

I'm sure the 'Equal Pay Comparator job analysis' paper is just one of the WPBR documents that senior officials in Glasgow would prefer to keep hidden from public view, but the cat's well and truly out of the bag now! 

Even now, all these years later, no one has apologised for the Council's behaviour which, in my view, amounts to a serious failure of leadership on the part of the senior officials and Glasgow's elected politicians.  

 

Coming Soon - Evidence of Duplicity! (02/12/18)

A kind person has sent me a very interesting document which has to do with Glasgow City Council's estimated liability over equal pay.

Now the document isn't concerned with 2018 - instead it focuses on the last occasion when the Council offered to 'buy out' its workers equal pay claims with 'low ball' offers of settlement in the run-up to Christmas 2005.

Interestingly, the calculations were prepared by the same external consultants who developed the WPBR for the City Council.

Regular readers will recall that the Council's chief executive, Annemarie O'Donnell, claims that senior officials have always acted in 'good faith' over the WPBR and that their aim was to eliminate gender based pay discrimination with the introduction of this controversial pay scheme.

Regular readers also know the Council is refusing to release vital information about the WPBR which would prove or disprove this 'good faith' claim in double quick time.

Anyway, the document I have acquired about Glasgow's equal pay liabilities back in 2005 is explosive because the figures confirm that the Council 'robbed' thousands of low paid workers of hundreds of millions of pounds with derisory offers of settlement which were 'capped' at just £9,000.

So tune in again tomorrow and decide for yourself, but after reading these figures I suspect many of the Claimants will be 'fit to be tied up', as they say.

And many thanks to the public-spirited individual who sent me the document - the truth will out and I suspect this is just one of the many crucial WPBR documents the Council is refusing to release in response to my FoI Requests.

Who knows, maybe some of the Council's political leaders will start to take a real interest in these matters and help shine a light on what senior officials have been upped to all these years with their 'unfit for purpose' WPBR pay scheme.

Because I'll eat my hat if this information was shared with elected members and/or properly reported to the relevant  Council Committees at the time.