NLC News

A reader from North Lanarkshire has been in touch to say that she had a meeting with Margaret Mitchell, MSP, the other day about equal pay and recent developments in the ongoing Employment Tribunal.

Now I don't know Margaret Mitchell personally, but she is a 'list' MSP for the wider regional constituency which covers North Lanarkshire Council and I know that Margaret Mitchell has previously taken equal pay issues up with South Lanarkshire Council.

Other readers have also contacted me to say that they have been speaking to their local councillors with a mixed bag of responses so far, although as often happens on these occasions the senior officials and not the politicians tend to get the blame.

Anyway, the important thing is to turn up the heat on the Council by continuing to raise the issues and by asking local councillors, MSPs and MPs what they are going to do to support their constituents.  

Epic Failure (12 March 2014)

One of the most impressive things about the Employment Tribunal involving North Lanarkshire Council earlier this week is the way that Daphne Romney QC (who is of course acting for the Action 4 Equality Scotland clients) - took a great big stick to the Council's case.

What Daphne wanted to know and what I really wanted to hear is how the Council could simply abandon a defence which North Lanarkshire has relied upon for years and expect that people would swallow that it had just made a 'mistake' or an 'error' - over people's job evaluations and scores.

Because for years the most senior officials in the Council have been insisting that they were right - that the scores awarded to Home Support Workers (Home Carers), School Crossing Patrollers and Playground Supervisors were correct and fully justified.

Complete baloney, as it turned out.

Yet some senior managers stated this was true, on oath, in their evidence to the tribunal and others have said so in Witness Statements which, interestingly, have still to be tested under cross examination.

And now the Council has been forced to climb down and concede that the job evaluation scores (on which people's grades and pay are based) are 'not to be relied upon'.   

In other words that they are 'unsafe' and 'unsound', but surely the Council owes the tribunal a proper explanation for wasting all this time - and surely the workforce deserves to be told how the Council got itself into this terrible mess.

Especially when so many senior officials have been getting very well paid to oversee the whole job evaluation process which was supposed to ensure fair treatment and deliver equal pay for work of equal value. 

Now I would expect that if Home Support Workers (or other workers) in North Lanarkshire were not doing their jobs properly, they would quickly be hauled up in front of their bosses and asked to explain themselves - and rightly so.

And if a plausible reason or explanation was not forthcoming pretty damn quick, that person or persons could expect to be facing a disciplinary hearing - so surely what's sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander.

Because if you ask me, North Lanarkshire has let the workforce down and is guilty of failure on a epic scale - and somebody, somewhere ought to be required to answer for the way the whole business has been handled.

An apology would be a good place to start, so let's see what happens in the days ahead.

More to follow soon - watch this space.

Council Bombshell (11 March 2014)

Well what a day it was yesterday in the Glasgow Employment Tribunal - a momentous day if you ask me, because North Lanarkshire Council (NLC) was finally forced to concede that the gradings awarded to many of its women workers are wrong.

Specifically, the Council has abandoned its defence of the gradings applied to Home Support Workers (Home Carers), School Crossing Patrol Workers and Playground Supervisors - despite arguing for years that the pay and grading of these predominantly female jobs were absolutely fine.

The only way for the Council to rectify the situation is to appoint someone who can evaluate these jobs independently and properly, but that is of course what should have happened many years ago.

Other jobs may follow because the case made by the claimants and by the A4ES barrister, Daphne Romney QC, is that someone has to answer for how this could possibly have been allowed to happen - when so many well paid and senior Council managers were overseeing the process, supposedly to ensure that this was fair to all staff.

The tribunal also heard submissions from Daphne Romney QC which claimed that the way in which the Council assimilated staff on to new grades was discriminatory also - because it favoured all the bonus earning male jobs to the detriment of the women's jobs.

Apparently the Council used the men's bonus earnings to determine their place on the North Lanarkshire pay scale, but only the male jobs received bonus payments which are now accepted as discriminatory because they were effectively part of basic pay and were not related to productivity.

For example, a male worker earning £6.00 per hour plus a 60% bonus (which many of them did) was effectively on an hourly rate of £9.60 an hour - yet a female job on the same grade was assimilated to the NLC pay scale in a much less favourable way by ignoring the impact of the bonus payments.  

In other words the women workers should have been put in exactly the same position as the men before the assimilation process took place - because by ignoring the bonus payments (paid only to traditional male jobs) the men received a much better deal than the women.

So if you ask me, the Council's case has turned into something of a dog's dinner and that's not even the end of it because there's also the issue of protection which again seems to have worked in favour of the men - and to the detriment of the women.

The 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement agreed a three year protection period for people who lost out over the new join evaluation arrangements, but for some reason the Council seems to have ignored this provision and the male groups again seem to fare better than their female colleagues.

More details to follow in the days ahead - so watch this space.