Essex County Council has told UNISON that it wants to revisit ‘Single Status.’ This was the process which finished about 15 years ago whereby every single job in ECC was job evaluated resulting in clearer relations between different jobs and they way they are paid.
Since then posts have changed and been created and the gradings have departed from the original agreement. So the County has said that they want do the exercise again to try and put some more order into it.
The difference this time is that they do not want to use the nationally agreed ‘Gauge’ system which the unions helped devise and which gave UNISON the right to be involved in all the individual evaluations. Now they only want to use the Hay system that they have always used for post graded at Band 5 and above. UNISON has not been told whether we will be able to participate in the way that we did first time round. We are taking advice for higher up in the union as to what our view should be, especially if we are excluded from the detailed process.
