Out-Law News 2 min. read
22 Jun 2012, 9:51 am
South Lanarkshire Council is "the only large council in Scotland" which has refused to settle ongoing equal pay cases with over 2,400 current and former female employees according to Fox Cross, the law firm representing the women. The cases relate to the historical payment of performance-related bonuses to workers in typically male professions, such as refuse collectors and street cleaners, while workers in typically female professions such as cleaners and care workers received no such bonuses.
Similar cases have already arisen in local authorities across the UK. Each has so far ended in a settlement, including a test case involving dinner ladies and female care workers with Sheffield City Council which was settled in September 2011 just before it was due to be considered by the Supreme Court.
"I am absolutely delighted for all the claimants who have waited over six years for this result," said Carol Fox, a solicitor with the firm. "They have worked hard as cleaners, catering assistants and carers and have watched in dismay as all other councils reached settlements. South Lanarkshire Council ploughed on defending the indefensible at taxpayers' expense."
She called on the authority to settle with the women rather than proceed to a full hearing.
Under the Equal Pay Act, now incorporated into the Equality Act, it can be an absolute defence to an equal pay claim if an employer has evaluated both the jobs in question and the jobs of male 'comparators' under an unbiased job evaluation scheme. This means that where an appropriate job evaluation has been carried out, an employment tribunal cannot carry out further "outside scrutiny" of an employer's pay processes, even if the equal pay claim is "well founded".
However, the tribunal said that the council's process was "unreliable" as it focused on a limited number of tasks rather than on the whole job and did not provide sufficient explanations as to how the scheme scored particular tasks. In addition, the scheme was confusing with even the authority's own management claiming a "limited understanding" of the process. The council opted out of the national pay and grading scheme implemented by most local authorities in favour of its own in-house process.
"By analysing individual tasks, the [South Lanarkshire scheme] fails to measure the job as a whole," the judgment said. "It is a different method of job evaluation to that described in [the Equal Pay Act] where the analytical process applies factors to the job of the claimant and her comparators."
The tribunal did however concede that the evaluation scheme itself was not "openly discriminatory" in its design. It was not, it said, "designed to 'get around' the issue of potentially discriminatory bonus payments".
In a statement, South Lanarkshire Council said that it was considering its next course of action.
"This is a complex judgment reflecting the fact that two and a half years' worth of evidence was heard in this case," it said. "We will be taking time to analyse the content before considering our next course of action. Crucially, the tribunal did not find our job evaluation scheme to be sex discriminatory."
