Epic Failure (12/0314)

One of the most impressive things about the Employment Tribunal involving North Lanarkshire Council earlier this week is the way that Daphne Romney QC (who is of course acting for the Action 4 Equality Scotland clients) - took a great big stick to the Council's case.

What Daphne wanted to know and what I really wanted to hear is how the Council could simply abandon a defence which North Lanarkshire has relied upon for years and expect that people would swallow that it had just made a 'mistake' or an 'error' - over people's job evaluations and scores.

Because for years the most senior officials in the Council have been insisting that they were right - that the scores awarded to Home Support Workers (Home Carers), School Crossing Patrollers and Playground Supervisors were correct and fully justified.

Complete baloney, as it turned out.

Yet some senior managers stated this was true, on oath, in their evidence to the tribunal and others have said so in Witness Statements which, interestingly, have still to be tested under cross examination.

And now the Council has been forced to climb down and concede that the job evaluation scores (on which people's grades and pay are based) are 'not to be relied upon'.   

In other words that they are 'unsafe' and 'unsound', but surely the Council owes the tribunal a proper explanation for wasting all this time - and surely the workforce deserves to be told how the Council got itself into this terrible mess.

Especially when so many senior officials have been getting very well paid to oversee the whole job evaluation process which was supposed to ensure fair treatment and deliver equal pay for work of equal value. 

Now I would expect that if Home Support Workers (or other workers) in North Lanarkshire were not doing their jobs properly, they would quickly be hauled up in front of their bosses and asked to explain themselves - and rightly so.

And if a plausible reason or explanation was not forthcoming pretty damn quick, that person or persons could expect to be facing a disciplinary hearing - so surely what's sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander.

Because if you ask me, North Lanarkshire has let the workforce down and is guilty of failure on a epic scale - and somebody, somewhere ought to be required to answer for the way the whole business has been handled.

An apology would be a good place to start, so let's see what happens in the days ahead.

More to follow soon - watch this space.