Glasgow City Council - Forced To Break Cover
So it seems my post accusing Glasgow City Council of bad faith over its 'reinventing the wheel' approach to equal pay settlement negotiations has drawn a response from the council's chief executive, Annemarie O'Donnell.
Here's what AOD had to tell the Glasgow 'workforce family' after months of silence from the council bunker on George Square:
Wednesday 25 August, 2021
"I want to give you an update about the council's commitment to resolving equal pay claims.
You may recall from previous communications that agreement was reached with all parties involved on how to settle equal pay claims up to 2018. Payments to claimants were made following approval of the funding at the City Administration Committee in February 2019.
Some claimants were also due payments towards pensions and the calculations and settlements for pensions are still ongoing due to the complexity of the process. I can assure you that this remains a priority for the council and the process is being worked on by council officers.
As you know we are in the process of implementing a new pay and grading scheme and until that scheme is implemented, we will continue to deal with the issue of equal pay claims.
This involves negotiations between the council and claimants' representatives which includes our trade unions, on how to settle any new claims and the ongoing claims from 2018 and until a new scheme is in place.
Senior council officers are now meeting claimants' representatives and trade unions fortnightly to agree how to settle new and outstanding claims.
We will continue to keep everyone updated on this matter including committee decisions required to approve the process and payments to claimants
Now this sounds as if everything is just 'ticketyboo' which is just complete nonsense, of course, otherwise claimants would not be hearing a completely different story from their representatives.
Time to turn up the heat if you ask me, because from long experience I can honestly say that when it comes to equal pay at least GCC can be trusted about as far as I can carry an elephant on my back.
GCC's Wrecking Tactics Over Equal Pay (August 24, 2021)
So the word from Glasgow is that senior council officials seem intent on wrecking the long awaited negotiations needed to secure a final settlement to its 15-year-old equal pay dispute.
Instead of accepting the obvious and sensible proposal, from the Claimants representatives, to base a further settlement on the agreement reached in 2019 the SNP led council says it wants to 'reinvent the wheel' and start all over again.
Which is as daft as it sounds - a wrecking tactic, if you ask me.
Because the partial settlement of the dispute agreed in 2019 accepted that the council's WPBR pay arrangements (introduced in 2007) are 'unfit for purpose' and must be replaced by a completely new, non-discriminatory job evaluation scheme and pay structure.
So the council's suggestion sounds like a cynical, time wasting, delaying tactic to kick the issue into the long grass - past next year's Glasgow council elections.
Now I'm not involved in the negotiations, but what I would do is to put a demand on the table that Glasgow City Council agrees to negotiate a further settlement of all outstanding claims up to April 2022 - using the previous 2019 settlement as a guide.
And if the SNP politicians refuse to authorise their officials to negotiate on this basis, I would run a high profile public campaign against the council leadership all the way up to the Glasgow council elections in May 2022.
Joint Statement- A4E, GMB, Unison following Equal Pay Settlement Negotiations 18.8.21
This morning the joint claimant group (A4E, GMB, Unison) met with the Council to formally restart negotiations. Our shared priority is to settle outstanding pre-2018 claims up to 2018, to put all claimants into the same position. Our other urgent work is to finally resolve the issues with pensions for all those who have already received a settlement but not had their pension recalculated properly.
The next step will be to secure another interim settlement for all claimants.
Settling everyone up to 2018 will cost the Council in the region of £45m, money we are certain they have access to from previous borrowing exercises. This should be a very straightforward process as we have the settlement blueprint from 2019. However, the Council have informed us that their position is that they will not replicate the previous settlement arrangements. This means that they would be happy to have two colleagues doing exactly the same job, receive different amounts of money purely based on when they lodged their claim.
The joint claimant group will not accept this position. Not only will this delay the process, it is grossly unfair. Parity for all claimants is a core principle for the joint claimant group.
We have also received a very dissatisfactory update on pensions. The progress, which depends on work being done by both GCC and Strathclyde Pension Fund, has been unacceptably slow. Not only that, but GCC have made many, many mistakes in calculations and data. This would have resulted in claimants being shortchanged AGAIN, had it not been caught by Karl Bromley.
To add insult to injury, claimants were subject to a major data breach when GCC sent out claimant data to the wrong claimants.
Members work their entire lives contributing to pensions in the belief that they will have a fair and reasonable sum to live on in their retirement. It is unacceptable how little care and attention has gone into protecting your pensions.
With the slow progress on pensions and the Council’s attempt to throw out the previous settlement, the Joint Claimant Group is now in discussion about next steps. We have no choice but to proceed to tribunal but the questions remains whether work can be progressed outside of the court room.
This has not been a constructive or positive start to the negotiations and it seems clear that Glasgow has not learned its lessons from the first settlement process.
Kind Regards
Sean Baillie
GMB Scotland Organiser
