Fórsa has sought an ‘urgent’ conciliation meeting with the Local Government Management Agency (LGMA) following their failure to progress a long-awaited job evaluation scheme for the sector.

In July of this year the LGMA confirmed to the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) that they would, by the end of October, produce job descriptions and furnish a written response to the union’s business case. To date, they have not presented the union with any such correspondence.

Fórsa‘s head of local government Richy Carrothers said the union will not allow this to continue and the WRC has been requested to reconvene an urgent conciliation meeting as soon as possible.

“The employer has not meet obligations as set out in the Labour Court in 2017, we will not let this continue any further,” he said.

Fórsa has long sought a local authority job evaluation scheme similar to the one that operates in the HSE and the education sector.

Job evaluation is an established tool that allows the knowledge, skills and responsibilities associated with individual jobs - rather than grades or staff categories – to be assessed and appropriately rewarded.

Fórsa maintains that almost 10,000 council jobs were lost following the financial crisis, and services have only been preserved because staff have taken on additional responsibilities above their pay grades.

Richy said that the current pay system in local government “lacked equality, consistency and fairness.”

“Local authorities suffered the greatest reduction of numbers of employees during the austerity era, which has resulted in significant grade drift in the sector. Why should these workers suffer less favourable treatment than colleagues in other sectors,” he said.

Richy explained that there are severe disparities in pay rates across the local government sector, where staff doing the same work could be paid differently depending on which of the 31 councils they work for.

“It is completely unacceptable that clerical and administration, library staff, museum curators, archivists, technicians and so many more, are being paid different pay rates in different counties. That is undermining the similar level of work and effort that’s put in by people in these grades, just based on what council they work for,” Richy said.