NORTHUMBERLAND COUNTY COUNCIL JOB EVALUATION - SINGLE STATUS

As you will be aware Northumberland County Council (NCC) have written to you on an individual basis and invited you to sign to agree your new job evaluated salary outcome and this step is outside of a negotiated collective agreement.

The advice from the UNISON is that you do not do this on the following grounds:

a)    Once you sign to accept the new pay, you give up the right to appeal against your evaluation.  This means that even if you find out at a later date that you are being paid incorrectly and have a valid case you will not be able to appeal.

b)    We are aware that people have not received job descriptions with their letter so they are unaware of how their job has been evaluated, and have no understanding as to whether the information they are being asked to agree to is correct or not.

c)    Even if you are gaining, you may not be gaining as much as you should be due to the fact that the Council has acknowledged to us that people may have been aligned to the wrong job etc and therefore the information supplied is not 100% reliable.    

d)    The offer on your job evaluated outcome is only a part of what the Job Evaluation/Single Status package is to you.  The Joint Trade Unions (GMB, UNITE and UNISON) are still negotiating with the Council on other Terms and Conditions which may impact on any gains you may have achieved as a result of your job evaluation outcome, so it is possible that if you are currently entitled to a pay rise, you may end up by being either no better off or facing loss with what the Council are proposing on the other conditions.

No other Council in the Northern Region have prevented their staff from appealing against their evaluated outcome/salaries and it is a clear tactic to prevent you from raising any valid complaint about your new pay, in the future, and this is not done with the agreement of UNISON.

I would advise you not to sign NCC’s letter and complete and return the attached appeal letter to Employee Services at the Council.

UNISON will then support you through the Northumberland County Branch and investigate any concerns over your job evaluation outcome.  You should also advise the branch that you have lodged an appeal. We have recently requested that the Council scrap the deadline for appeals; however they confirmed yesterday that it will only be extended for a month until July 22^nd 2011.

Should you sign up and agree to your job evaluated outcome against the advice of UNISON, then we would not be able to assist you in the future should a problem in relation to your evaluation become apparent.

The Joint Trade Unions have produced a fact sheet and general advice on this matter that you should have received by now, if you have not please contact the Northumberland County Branch of UNISON on 01670 533016/779 and we will post or email you a copy.

NCC, in taking this course of action, has undermined the collective bargaining approach, however UNISON and the other unions involved are still committed to continued negotiations with NCC to improve the current set of proposals and we will keep you advised of any progress on an ongoing basis.

Yours sincerely

Regional ORGANISER