Joint Statement by UNISON, GMB and Unite

Shropshire Job Evaluation – Phase 2



We refer to the statement issued unilaterally by Shropshire County Council to employees on 4 March 2008. This statement refers to the difficulties in obtaining national authorisation of the proposals for implementing job evaluation and lists the beneficial aspects of the proposals that the County Council is putting forward.

All of the beneficial elements of Phase 2 have been negotiated by the trade unions on your behalf and on the face of it appear to be an attractive package. However, the joint trade unions have been unable to persuade the County Council through negotiation to implement a job evaluation scheme that is fit for purpose, i.e. one that at least begins to address the gender pay gap between female and male employees. Currently, the average pay of the 80% of employees in Phases 1 and 2 who are women is 17% less than the average pay for male employees in the two phases.

1. The impact of job evaluation should be to reduce that gender pay gap, in fact it increases it. Part of the reason for this is that almost 200 employees in Phase 2 who are on linked grades will not be placed on their job evaluated grade for up to 3 years, which is unacceptable.

2. Further, there are issues around the drawing of the grade boundaries which has led to a large group of female workers just missing moving to a higher grade.

3. There is also the issue of those employees who go up from the top end of Phase 2 into Phase 3. The County Council has point blank refused to give a commitment to a date when Phase 3 will be implemented and when those employees will receive their correct job evaluated rate of pay.

4. There is a further important issue of what happens on 1 April 2009 when unitary status is brought in. Shropshire County Council has not discussed with the trade unions the mechanism that will be used to ensure that job evaluation applies fairly across the whole of the new unitary authority.

5. The reason why the trade unions are not able to agree, either at local or national level, the proposals is that, as they currently stand, when unitary comes about there will need to be a further complete job re-evaluation because of the issues raised above. We do not believe it is in members’ medium term interests for they and their colleagues in district councils to have to go through the stress and uncertainty created by a further complete job re-evaluation. In order to try to avoid the need for that and to agree a process which both addresses the pay gender gap issue and the transition to unitary, the trade unions have offered to jointly fund with the County Council a report by an independent equal pay expert to try to understand how these problems can be dealt with. However, the County Council has not responded positively to this offer and, given their unilateral issuing of the statement yesterday, this offer is now withdrawn.

The trade unions are committed to try to negotiate a beneficial outcome for all our members of job evaluation but given the issuing of yesterday’s statement will oppose any attempts by the authority to seek to impose a pay and grading structure that is not in members’ long term interests.