Kay Gilbert

Tool, weapon or cloaking device? The role of job evaluation in determining equal value in tribunals

Purpose – Aims to identify standards set for job evaluation and assess the use of job evaluation by its executors. Design/methodology/approach – Before examining the Employment Tribunals’ approach, focuses on research already undertaken with a view to assessing job evaluation methods as an approach to achieve pay equity. Examines the establishment of standards set by case law and goes on to consider the way in which job evaluation methods have been used in employment tribunal cases, how the standards apply, and whether there are wider issues being considered. Findings – Finds that in addition to determining equal pay, in some cases job evaluation has acted as a barrier or weapon against those making such a claim. The standards set for job evaluation appear to have been used variably in determining that the jobs are not equal in value under the guises of no reasonable grounds, material factor defences and in Tribunal decision making. Originality/value – Demonstrates that job evaluation as a tool can and does provide the means of assessing jobs to make an equal value decision. However, at times it appears not be used, thoroughly or methodically.

Promises and practices: job evaluation and equal pay forty years on!

This article examines the claim made by Barbara Castle when introducing the Equal Pay Act (EPA) in 1970 that there is nothing preventing unions pressing for job evaluation schemes to achieve equal pay. It does this by examining the research on potential hurdles to job evaluation and those that can be found in the UK law since the introduction of the EPA. The article concludes that the standards for selecting job evaluation and the obstacles of introducing job evaluation have significantly changed over the period, leaving little promise of an extension of its use to achieve equal pay.

New Initiative, Old Problem: Classroom Assistants and the Under‐Valuation of Women's Work

Centred on classroom assistants in Scotland, this article examines the process by which an occupation dominated by female workers becomes under-valued. The qualitative data reveals the cognitive errors made by the key actors—government, employers and unions in this process.

The role of job evaluation in determining equal value in tribunals

Purpose – Aims to identify standards set for job evaluation and assess the use of job evaluation by its executors. Design/methodology/approach – Before examining the Employment Tribunals’ approach, focuses on research already undertaken with a view to assessing job evaluation methods as an approach to achieve pay equity. Examines the establishment of standards set by case law and goes on to consider the way in which job evaluation methods have been used in employment tribunal cases, how the standards apply, and whether there are wider issues being considered. Findings – Finds that in addition to determining equal pay, in some cases job evaluation has acted as a barrier or weapon against those making such a claim. The standards set for job evaluation appear to have been used variably in determining that the jobs are not equal in value under the guises of no reasonable grounds, material factor defences and in Tribunal decision making. Originality/value – Demonstrates that job evaluation as a tool can and does provide the means of assessing jobs to make an equal value decision. However, at times it appears not be used, thoroughly or methodically.

Back to the Future? Change and Continuity at Work

The original title for this book was ‘Should life all labour be?’ Tennyson’s evocative summation of the duality that work has always represented in our lives: recognized for its sustaining necessity but at the same time resented for its dominance. It could be argued that, historically, the prevailing work ethic in society has striven to enhance the former meaning and diminish the latter and, in the introduction to this book we noted that, in recent government economic and social policy, we can discern the constituents of a new work ethic for our time. The repeated theme that full citizenship and personal fulfilment are only attainable through participation in paid work has elevated the concept of work centrality, the philosophical importance in people’s lives of the work they do, beyond the somewhat confined circles of academic discourse and into the area of policy.

Women and Men

A little-discussed component of the knowledge society model has been the predicted eradication of the gendered inequalities that have been a feature of industrial capitalism. Castells (1996), for example, claimed that information and communication technologies would reverse the relegation of women to deskilled or menial jobs as historical stereotypes were replaced by the demand for an autonomous, skilled labour force. As relatively new employment sectors, we might expect call centre and software work to demonstrate this convergence between men and women. Yet, they already represent horizontally segregated occupations with female-dominated (call centres) and male-dominated (software) workforces, and are often presented as examples of distinctively women’s and men’s work. Our data is also suggestive of vertical segregation: women were underrepresented at management levels in call centres despite their numerical dominance within the occupation, and in software, our findings showed a tendency for women to be located in less technical, lower-level roles.

Exploring equal value dispute procedures: Power and conflict under Labour

The paper seeks to draw attention to the complexity involved in developing fair procedures for assessing equal value in employment. It first highlights different aspects of fairness in relation to employment procedures and some of the problems associated with the use of procedures in relation to job evaluation and sex bias. The paper then explores the nature of the conflicts that are part of equal pay for work of equal value procedures within the UK before examining the nature of power that some have who are involved in procedures both within the workplace and in Employment Tribunal.

Class and Status

This chapter examines whether the influential analyses of the changing patterns of social class and perceptions of class identity amongst employees, symbolized by the ‘death of the working class’ thesis, are verified in our two leading new economy sectors, namely, software and call centres. These analyses concern the assumed disintegration of Marxist-inspired class analysis, the fragmentation of class structure and their replacement by other organizing criteria of social groups, such as voluntarily chosen identities. The claimed emergence of the information or network society has added a further dimension to the extant sociological debates concerning the existence and basis of class.

Organizational Life: The Management of Commitment

One of the research goals was to evaluate whether, after twenty years of the HRM agenda as the new orthodoxy, work had been elevated to a more central position in employees’ lives, as measured by stated levels of organizational commitment. Despite the stated aim of integrating employment practice to company business strategy (Storey, 1992; Guest, 1989), HRM theory is often strangely de-contextualized, apart from token references to globalization and an enhanced competitive environment. For the purposes of HRM, the company is often treated as semi-autonomous capsule, isolated from the rest of society, and this narrow focus on the workplace is, ironically, mirrored in many critical studies of control in the work organization, whether undertaken from a labour process or Foucaultian perspective. Yet movements and changes in the operation of the capitalist economy, such as market turbulence and relations between units of capital (financial and industrial), often have a direct influence on all members of work organizations and on the employment relationship at the level of the firm (Hyman, 1987; Thompson, 2003). Thus we would argue that a major reason for the oft-observed disjunction between the HRM rhetoric and the experienced reality (Legge, 1995; Thompson, 2003) lies in the particular political-economic context within which organizations are located at any point in time and to which they must respond.

Organizational Life: The Nature of Work

In this, and the following chapter, we are concerned with the overarching and broadly-defined concept of organizational life, and focus on two core themes. In the present chapter we examine work organization, labour process and management control, and employee experiences and perceptions in relation to these, and explore the contrasts that exist between the sectors. On the basis of previous knowledge, although with important qualifications, we expected call centres to more approximate regimes of ‘direct control’, while software development would exhibit strong tendencies towards ‘responsible autonomy’. In Chapter 4, we explore management strategy and, in particular, subject to critical scrutiny the extent to which the much-heralded agendas of human resource management deliver the promised, but elusive, outcomes of commitment and job satisfaction. This chapter includes discussion of pay and pay systems. A third related theme pertaining to organizational life, which considers worker attitudes, and principally investigates the claim that individualism has replaced collectivism as a new orthodoxy of employee relations, will be discussed in Chapter 8. We begin by outlining the work settings of our individual case studies.