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Single Status and Equal Pay

The fact that the Council had developed over years a rather random system of working out how much people were paid is being reviewed at the moment.

The biggest part of this is not Single Status, but in fact Equal Pay. Basically the council has to justify any differentials between jobs on the basis of some system of "measuring the job".

This causes considerable stress simply because the council cannot just put up the salaries of those who are calculated as needing an increase. It also has (over time) to reduce the salaries of those who are calculated as being overpaid.

It is quite a complicated system of change that I reviewed in detail yesterday morning.

What this means is that some staff face pay cuts. In the mean time Labour have said that Councillors should have an almost 5% increase in pay. The administration argue that we should hold ourselves back to 1.9% (until the final staff settlement is known at which we use that figure) in recognition of the difficulties faced by a number of members of staff.

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