Colleagues
The below letter has today been sent to all workplaces, added to our website, e-mailed to all members who have signed up for updates, e-mailed to all stewards to distribute to members, and added to our Facebook page.
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Dear Member
RE-EVALUATION PROJECT – PAY REVIEW
By now you should be aware of UNISON’s long running campaign to achieve equal pay for groups of members who have had low earnings due to alleged gender discrimination.
As a result of the Council’s decision to settle these claims with UNISON and the other claimant groups (Fox and Partners, UNITE) we have finally won the right to have these jobs reviewed. Our aim is to have these undervalued jobs looked at and have the correct grade applied to them through a new joint evaluation process.
Fox and Partners settled first and as part of their agreement requested that certain jobs would undergo a re-evaluation. When we settled on the same cash terms as Fox and Partners for equal pay, these jobs were added as a condition of our agreement. These jobs are:-
Playground Supervisors
School Crossing Patrollers
Home Support Workers
Road Sweepers
Refuse Collectors
Gardeners at grades 4 & 5
Chargehand Gardeners at grade 6
We have an agreement that UNISON can add additional jobs to this list to be re-evaluated, and our lawyers are currently working on which job groups this will cover.
The trade unions (UNISON, UNITE, GMB) have not reached formal agreement on how these evaluations will take place as yet, but training for trade union job analysts has begun, and job holders who will be interviewed for this process have been identified.
However, the branch is not blind to the fact that this achievement only covers those jobs involved in equal pay issues. To that end we are discussing changes to the current re-evaluation policy with the Council to allow other groups of employees to have a fair and balanced evaluation of their job. UNISON feel that the current process is far too restrictive, and that it must change, ideally before October 2015.
Further information will be provided when an agreement on the evaluation process is reached, in the meantime I hope this has been helpful.
John Mooney