Are You Listening Glasgow?



Here's the no-holds barred resignation letter from Carrie Gracie, the BBC's former China editor who has accused the corporation of operating blatantly discriminatory pay arrangements.

Now the situation in Glasgow City Council, Scotland's largest council by far, is even worse if you ask me.

Because after a 10 year long fight Scotland highest civil court, the Court of Session, issued a damning judgement in which it described Glasgow's WPBR pay scheme as 'unfit for purpose'.

Yet senior officials in the council are still fighting a desperate rearguard action, with talk of further appeals, instead of putting their hands up, apologising to the council's predominantly  female workforce and finally admitting that they've made a terrible mess of dealing with equal pay over the years.

I think I'll drop Carrie Gracie a note to wish her well and draw her attention to what's going on in Glasgow where Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is a local MSP, of course.

  

Dear BBC Audience,

My name is Carrie Gracie and I have been a BBC journalist for three decades. With great regret, I have left my post as China Editor to speak out publicly on a crisis of trust at the BBC.

The BBC belongs to you, the licence fee payer. I believe you have a right to know that it is breaking equality law and resisting pressure for a fair and transparent pay structure.

In thirty years at the BBC, I have never sought to make myself the story and never publicly criticised the organisation I love. I am not asking for more money. I believe I am very well paid already – especially as someone working for a publicly funded organisation. I simply want the BBC to abide by the law and value men and women equally.

On pay, the BBC is not living up to its stated values of trust, honesty and accountability. Salary disclosures the BBC was forced to make six months ago revealed not only unacceptably high pay for top presenters and managers but also an indefensible pay gap between men and women doing equal work. These revelations damaged the trust of BBC staff. For the first time, women saw hard evidence of what they’d long suspected, that they are not being valued equally.

Many have since sought pay equality through internal negotiation but managers still deny there is a problem. This bunker mentality is likely to end in a disastrous legal defeat for the BBC and an exodus of female talent at every level.

Mine is just one story of inequality among many, but I hope it will help you understand why I feel obliged to speak out.

I am a China specialist, fluent in Mandarin and with nearly three decades of reporting the story. Four years ago, the BBC urged me to take the newly created post of China Editor.

I knew the job would demand sacrifices and resilience. I would have to work 5000 miles from my teenage children, and in a heavily censored one-party state I would face surveillance, police harassment and official intimidation.

I accepted the challenges while stressing to my bosses that I must be paid equally with my male peers. Like many other BBC women, I had long suspected that I was routinely paid less, and at this point in my career, I was determined not to let it happen again. Believing that I had secured pay parity with men in equivalent roles, I set off for Beijing.

In the past four years, the BBC has had four international editors - two men and two women. The Equality Act 2010 states that men and women doing equal work must receive equal pay. But last July I learned that in the previous financial year, the two men earned at least 50% more than the two women.

Despite the BBC’s public insistence that my appointment demonstrated its commitment to gender equality, and despite my own insistence that equality was a condition of taking up the post, my managers had yet again judged that women's work was worth much less than men's.

My bewilderment turned to dismay when I heard the BBC complain of being forced to make these pay disclosures. Without them, I and many other BBC women would never have learned the truth.

I told my bosses the only acceptable resolution would be for all the international editors to be paid the same amount. The right amount would be for them to decide, and I made clear I wasn't seeking a pay rise, just equal pay. Instead the BBC offered me a big pay rise which remained far short of equality. It said there were differences between roles which justified the pay gap, but it has refused to explain these differences. Since turning down an unequal pay rise, I have been subjected to a dismayingly incompetent and undermining grievance process which still has no outcome.

Enough is enough. The rise of China is one of the biggest stories of our time and one of the hardest to tell. I cannot do it justice while battling my bosses and a byzantine complaints process. Last week I left my role as China Editor and will now return to my former post in the TV newsroom where I expect to be paid equally.

For BBC women this is not just a matter of one year’s salary or two. Taking into account disadvantageous contracts and pension entitlements, it is a gulf that will last a lifetime. Many of the women affected are not highly paid ‘stars’ but hard-working producers on modest salaries. Often women from ethnic minorities suffer wider pay gaps than the rest.

This is not the gender pay gap that the BBC admits to. It is not men earning more because they do more of the jobs which pay better. It is men earning more in the same jobs or jobs of equal value. It is pay discrimination and it is illegal.

On learning the shocking scale of inequality last July, BBC women began to come together to tackle the culture of secrecy that helps perpetuate it. We shared our pay details and asked male colleagues to do the same.

Meanwhile the BBC conducted various reviews. The outgoing Director of News said last month, “We did a full equal pay audit which showed there is equal pay across the BBC.” But this was not a full audit. It excluded the women with the biggest pay gaps. The BBC has now begun a ‘talent review’ but the women affected have no confidence in it. Up to two hundred BBC women have made pay complaints only to be told repeatedly there is no pay discrimination at the BBC. Can we all be wrong? I no longer trust our management to give an honest answer.

In fact, the only BBC women who can be sure they do not suffer pay discrimination are senior managers whose salaries are published. For example, we have a new, female, Director of News who did not have to fight to earn the same as her male predecessor because his £340 000 salary was published and so was hers. Elsewhere, pay secrecy makes BBC women as vulnerable as they are in many other workplaces.


How to put things right?

The BBC must admit the problem, apologise and set in place an equal, fair and transparent pay structure. To avoid wasting your licence fee on an unwinnable court fight against female staff, the BBC should immediately agree to independent arbitration to settle individual cases.

Patience and good will are running out. In the six months since July’s revelations, the BBC has attempted a botched solution based on divide and rule. It has offered some women pay ‘revisions’ which do not guarantee equality, while locking down other women in a protracted complaints process.

We have felt trapped. Speaking out carries the risk of disciplinary measures or even dismissal; litigation can destroy careers and be financially ruinous. What's more the BBC often settles cases out of court and demands non-disclosure agreements, a habit unworthy of an organisation committed to truth, and one which does nothing to resolve the systemic problem.

None of this is an indictment of individual managers. I am grateful for their personal support and for their editorial integrity in the face of censorship pressure in China. But for far too long, a secretive and illegal BBC pay culture has inflicted dishonourable choices on those who enforce it. This must change.

Meanwhile we are by no means the only workplace with hidden pay discrimination and the pressure for transparency is only growing. I hope rival news organisations will not use this letter as a stick with which to beat the BBC, but instead reflect on their own equality issues.

It is painful to leave my China post abruptly and to say goodbye to the team in the BBC’s Beijing bureau. But most of them are brilliant young women. I don’t want their generation to have to fight this battle in the future because my generation failed to win it now.

To women of any age in any workplace who are confronting pay discrimination, I wish you the solidarity of a strong sisterhood and the support of male colleagues.

It is a century since women first won the right to vote in Britain. Let us honour that brave generation by making this the year we win equal pay.


Carrie Gracie

Glasgow - Equal Pay Update (08/01/18)



A Glasgow reader hit the nail on the head with this comment on the big decision facing the City Council over its WPBR pay scheme which has been judged to be 'unfit for purpose' by the Court of Session, Scotland's highest civil court.    

"We will find out in next couple of weeks what Susan Aitken's and the SNP's true colours are. When they sorted out the janitors dispute after they came into power they weren't slow taking credit.

"So as far as I am concerned if they do appeal the buck stops at Susan Aitken and the SNP. At the last appeal they said it was clarity (got that from the judges) now I for one could never vote for the SNP again if they run off to London to appeal. In my eyes they would have lost all credibility."

A

To be fair, I think it's pretty clear that a big battle is being fought behind the scenes between elected councillors and senior officials.

But the discriminatory nature of Glasgow's WPBR pay arrangements are there for all to see and have now been laid bare in a powerful and unanimous judgment in Scotland's highest civil court.

The three judges were so unimpressed at the City Council's case that they went on to reject, unanimously again, Glasgow's application seeking 'leave to appeal' to the UK Supreme Court in London.

The fact is that the senior officials who have been defending the WPBR pay scheme are reluctant to admit that they got it badly wrong - that they let Glasgow's lowest paid workers down and carried on making a terrible mess of equal pay for another 10 years.  

'Facts are chiels that winna ding', as Robert Burns once wrote and if you ask me this all comes down to who really runs the City Council. 

  

Glasgow - Equal Pay Update (07/01/18)


The next round of settlement discussions with Glasgow City Council is due to take place on Tuesday 9 January 2018 - the first meeting of the New Year.

I think everyone's hope and expectation is that these talks will get down to brass tacks and begin to focus on exactly how the City Council plans to resolve all of its outstanding equal pay claims, as well as bringing in a replacement pay scheme for its thoroughly discredited, 'unfit for purpose' WPBR.

As regular readers know, Glasgow's application seeking 'leave to appeal' the Court of Session ruling (on the WPBR) to the UK Supreme Court was thrown out on its ear back on 21 December 2017.

The City Council's grounds of appeal were given short shrift in yet another unanimous decision by the Court of Session, Scotland's highest civil court.

What is not clear yet is whether Glasgow has finally accepted the reasoned judgment of the Court of Session - or will the City Council now try and seek 'leave to appeal' the damning WPBR decision in a further application directly to the UK Supreme Court in London?  

Now if you ask me, this would be very unwise because the judgment of the Court of Session was crystal clear and unequivocal which is why the Council's case was so comprehensively torn apart on 21 December 2017.

Not only that, of course, because there would be a huge political price to pay if an SNP led Glasgow were foolish enough to try and overturn a sound judgement from Scotland's highest civil court.

Particularly as the Council Leader, Susan Aitken, has repeatedly and publicly stated that the Council has no intention of pursuing such an appeal.

The Council has 28 days to lodge a further 'leave to appeal' application to the UK Supreme Court which expires on 17 January 2018.

So there's a huge amount at stake and this is exactly the kind of issue on which you would expect Glasgow's politicians to be speaking out and making clear where they stand - local councillors, MPs and MSPs.  

  

New Year Message for Glasgow (07/01/18)



If I were running Glasgow City Council, I would extend an invitation Frans de Waal's to explain the psychology of equal pay to the council's senior officials 

Watch this great excerpt from Ted Talks to see how low paid women workers in Glasgow have been treated for years, as second class citizens, paid in 'cucumbers' while their male colleagues were being rewarded with much juicer and tastier grapes.

But thanks to the long fight for equal pay and powerful backing from the Court of Session, Scotland's highest civil court, the tables have turned.

Glasgow's lowest paid, predominantly female workers now have the confidence to tell City Council bosses to stick their cucumbers where the sun don't shine! 

  


Glasgow's WPBR - Unfit for Purpose (04/12/17)


In the settlement discussions that are due to get underway with Glasgow City Council  today, one of the big issues that will need to be addressed is the WPBR (Workforce Pay and Benefits Review) pay scheme.

As regular readers know, the WPBR was judged to be 'unfit for purpose' in the recent appeal hearing at the Court of Session, Scotland's highest civil court.

So the big question is: Will Glasgow's WPBR be scrapped and replaced? 

Because if not, the City Council will find itself in a never ending series of challenges to this controversial, in-house job evaluation scheme (JES).   

If you ask me, the WPBR should be thrown on the scrapheap as it's a complete sham of a JE scheme which was designed to maintain the status quo - the historical pay differences between male and female jobs. 

In fact the WPBR is actually three different pay operations in one and the controversial scheme completely defies very important principles about job evaluation.

For a start Glasgow's WPBR is not 'open and transparent', but rather goes out of its way to obscure the differences between different jobs with a series of bizarre 'rules' which have been invented to benefit the interests (and pay) of traditional male jobs.

Job evaluation is supposed to be an objective process which assesses and rewards jobs on the basis of their skills and responsibilities which is what the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement was all about   

But the WPBR pay scheme has three separate elements which combine to determine how much an individual employee gets paid: WBPR, NSWP (Non Standard Working Pattern) and WCD (Working Context and Demands).
  1. WPBR is the supposedly objective job evaluation part of the scheme and is used to award an initial grade  
  2. NSWP has nothing to to with the content of a job, but is only concerned with when and how an employee's hours are worked.  
  3. WCD is another 'topping-up' exercise which awards additional points and   
I'll have a lot more to say about the WPBR in the days ahead, but just reflect on the fact that the NSWP part of the scheme introduced a bogus 'rule' which meant that only those employees contracted to work for 37 hours a week benefited from a working hours payment.

Now this was, and is, completely outrageous and discriminatory because this invented 'rule' was designed to benefit the Gardeners, Gravediggers and Road Workers.

Yet, the GMB union kept its head down and didn't kick up absolute hell on behalf of Home Carers, for example, who were contracted to fewer than 37 hours and received no payment whatsoever, unlike their male colleagues.

The same is true of shift payments the 'rules' of which which tend to reward traditionamale jobs for changing their shifts more than twice during a working week.

Yet thousands of Home carriers have been working split shifts - the most unpopular shift of all - but don't receive any recognition for having to be at work twice during the same day.

Stay tuned for more from the blog site about Glasgow's cockamamy WPBR pay scheme - and in the meantime share this post with your friends and co-workers.

Because when it comes to the fight for equal pay - knowledge is power.

  


Glasgow Pay Arrangements (06/04/17)


A Home Carer from Glasgow has been in touch to say that she (and many others) work a 50 hour week and a 20 hour week the week week, so why don't they qualify for a NSWP payment in Week 1 at least?

Now that's a good question because fairness and common sense would suggest that such a shift working arrangement would qualify for an NSWP payment at Level B for at least half the year, perhaps more if overtime hours were also taken into account.

But I'm pretty sure that Glasgow City Council interprets these 'cockamamy rules' in a way that is to the disadvantage of Home Carers by treating the 2 weeks as a 35-hour average so that the staff concerned receive no payment. 

My own view is that the NSWP working hours payment ought to be paid on a 'pro rata' basis like other pay related benefits such as sick, holiday pay and sick pay - that way all Home Carers on a 35 hour working week would receive 35/37ths (or 95%) of a Level B NSWP payment.

The trade unions should be on to this as well if you ask me, because you don't have to work 37 hours before becoming eligible to join a union or to take part in a union strike ballot.

The real problem is that Glasgow City Council has just invented these 'cockamamy rules' which are impossible to justify as they go against the spirit and letter of the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement which is based on equal treatment for part-time workers.

  

Cockamamy Council 'Rules' (05/04/17)


As regular readers know, Action 4 Equality Scotland is challenging various aspects of Glasgow's WPBR (Workforce Pay and Benefits Review) which the City Council introduced back in 2006/07.

One of the most controversial aspects of the WPBR scheme is over additional payments that are made under the heading of NSWP (Non Standard Working Pattern) payments.

I wrote previously on the blog site about how the Glasgow's predominantly female jobs seem to fare badly under the WPBR compared to their male colleagues, and this is also true when it comes to NSWP payments. 

Because one of the NSWP 'rules' is a requirement for employees to work 37 hours before they qualify for 7 'working hours' NSWP points.

Now points mean prizes under the WPBR and 7 NSWP points means that a 37 hour a week employee qualifies for Level B Payment which was worth £800 a year in 2006 - almost £10,000 over 12 years - and a whole lot more than people have been receiving in terms of annual pay increases, for example.

So who made up this barmy 'rule' and on what kind of twisted logic is this NSWP rule based?

Because it's completely crazy if you ask me - people don't have to work 37 hours to qualify for holiday pay, sick pay, or maternity pay - for example.

And can it really be a coincidence that the vast majority of Glasgow City Council employees who work less than 37 hours a week are women? 

Curiously all of Glasgow's hardworking Home Carers were placed on 35 hour a week contracts some years ago, so they miss out on a Level B Payment even though they work 95% of a 37 hour working week.

The 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement was supposed to ensure equal treatment for part-time workers, but that seems not to have happened in Glasgow where mysterious rules have been invented (by whom?) to exclude the council's lowest paid workers.

As far as I know the trade unions in Glasgow haven't called or even threatened a single strike to defend the rights of thousands of part-time workers affected by this cockamamy 'rule' which is a complete disgrace, if you ask me.

Because if points are to be awarded for hours worked, they should be pro-rated just like all other payments and benefits - not deliberately designed in such a way that treats women workers much less favourably than their male colleagues. 

No wonder the Labour leader of Glasgow City Council can't defend his party's position over equal pay, but readers are invited to drop Frank McAveety a note by email or Twitter and let him know what you think.

Email - frank.mcaveety@glasgow.gov.uk
Twitter - @FMcAveety


  

Glasgow's Pay Arrangements (02/04/17)


The workforce at Glasgow City Council is predominantly female - around 70% of its 27,000 or so employees are women.

So, all things being equal, you would expect women to occupy around 70% or of each job category and for women to be involved in 70% or so of all work related issues - from sickness absence and disciplinary hearings to interviews for a promoted post.


Unless, of course, there's a gender based explanation such as maternity or paternity leave - or there's some other factor at play such as discrimination, for example.


Here's an interesting table which shines a light on the payments Glasgow City Council staff receive for doing shift work - the Non-Standard Working Pattern (NSWP) part of Glasgow's Workforce Pay and Benefits review (WPBR). 

NSWP Percentage breakdown Grade 1 to 7
Grade
Male
Female
Totals
% of Males by grade in receipt of NSWP
% of females by grade in receipt of NSWP
0
3293
15441
18734
39.71%
81.07%
A
347
888
1235
4.18%
4.66%
B
2528
1382
3910
30.49%
7.26%
C
566
681
1247
6.83%
3.58%
D
1213
210
1423
14.63%
1.10%
E
20
43
63
0.24%
0.23%
F
325
402
727
3.92%
2.11%
TOTALS
8292
19047
27339
100.00%
100.00%
In receipt of NSWP
Gender
yes
no
Grand Total
% of All employees
% of employees in receipt of NSWP by gender
% of Gender in receipt of NSWP
Female
3606
15441
19047
69.67%
41.91%
18.93%
Male
4999
3293
8292
30.33%
58.09%
60.29%
TOTALS
8605
18734
27339
100.00%
100.00%
79.22%
Example: Total Female in receipt of NSWP divided by the overall total of both men and Woman in receipt of NSWP
Example: Total percentage of Female in receipt of NSWP divided by the total number of females employed

The figures are based on the WPBR in 2007 and number of things jump straight out to me:
  • Over 80% of women don't qualify for a NSWP payment because they score zero (0) points on the City Council's scoring system 
  • Far fewer women (19%) than men (60%) qualify for an NSWP payment even though women make up a big 70% majority of the City Council's workforce
  • Over 50% of male workers receive an NSWP payment at the higher paying B, C and D bands
  • Yet only 12% of women fall into the B,C and D bands.
Now I don't know who made up Glasgow's cockamamy scoring system, but if you ask me they have made up the rules in a way that punishes and discriminates against the jobs done by women. 

In the next few days I'll publish more information about the NSWP 'rules' and scoring system which I imagine will be of great interest to lots of readers in Glasgow.

As far as I know the unions in Glasgow have not called any strikes or even threatened industrial action over the operation of the NSWP scheme.

  

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