Staff win equal pay battle with Glasgow City Council

Unison Scotland has successfully challenged Glasgow City Council’s workforce, pay and benefits review, in a case that stretches back to 2006 and affects thousands of lower paid staff.

Scotland’s Court of Session ruled that the Employment Tribunal and Employment Appeals Tribunal had both been wrong in agreeing that Glasgow’s scheme was fair.

Unison objected to the use of different scales for core pay and non-core pay work and said the system made it impossible for employees to know if they were being paid equally for equal work.

The court said it had to decide where the burden of proof lay in showing the scheme satisfied requirements and whether the tribunal erred in finding that the “bespoke, novel and untested” scheme was suitable despite it containing no mechanism to aggregate the two values it produced.

Judges said that because of this absent mechanism, it was not for the tribunal to speculate as to whether aspects of the scheme might be made to work so as to render them compliant with the law.

“If there was a lacuna in the methodology of the [scheme], it was not part of the ET’s function to try to fill that lacuna,” the judges said.

“If the tribunal could not be satisfied on the basis of the evidence before it that the methodology of the [scheme] was justified and its analysis thorough, the ET required to find that it was not a valid job evaluation.”

The tribunal was aware there was no authority in which job evaluation leading to two separate points values has been considered and so should have kept “at the forefront of its mind where the burden of proof lay (namely, with regard to the issue of compliance with section1 (5), on the respondent) and only to reach a conclusion on the basis of the evidence presented to it”.

“The impression is created that there was an onus on the claimants to establish that the scheme was not compliant with section1 (5). We do not accept that there was any such onus.”

Although the tribunal admitted that deciding on the scheme’s workings required technical expertise it did not possess, it had wrongly tried to answer this question by “bringing to bear the eye of interested lay people”. The EAT had been wrong to agree with this, the court added.

The ruling affects some 6,000 female workers who had been excluded from sizeable bonuses for many years, Unison said.

Its Scottish secretary Mike Kirby said: “The way Glasgow rates and pays workers has been the source of conflict and division for ten years. These women have already waited long enough to receive the pay they have worked hard for and deserve. It’s time for Glasgow City Council to do the right thing and pay up on equal pay.”

Council leader Susan Aitken said: "Council officers will require time to consider all the implications of this ruling, but I have instructed them to continue to speak to the trade unions about the application of the pay and grading scheme.

“We have recently settled the long running janitors' dispute and we are actively working with the trade unions to settle all cases relating to pay protection, where a number of women continued to be paid unequally even after the introduction of the new pay and grading system.”

Mark Smulian