The Gazette 1973

Persons employed are for the purposes of the Act defined so as to include persons employed "under a contract personally to execute any work or labour" as well as persons employed under a contract of service. It became clear in Committee that this measure was intended to prevent avoidance of the Act by the use of labour-only sub-contracting, a rather wise move. The Government's claim is that by their three basic prin- ciples they have avoided the controversy between "equal pay for the same work"—the concept adopted by the Treaty of Rome—and "equal pay for work of equal value"—that of the ILO Convention. It has been fairly suggested, however, that the same dispute will reproduce itself when the concept of "equally favourable condi- tions for like work" comes to be applied. Expanding on the three principles : Definition of "like work" (1) A woman is to be regarded as in "like work" if her work and men's is of the same or a broadly-similar nature and the differences (if any) between the things she does and the things they do are not of practical importance in relation to terms and conditions of em- ployment; and accordingly comparing her work with theirs regard is to be had to the frequency or otherwise with which any such differences occur in practice, as well as to the nature and extent of their differences. How will the tribunals cope with all this particularly as comparison is to be made with all persons employed by the same employer in any establishment at which common terms and conditions are observed? How many and what terms and conditions must be common ones? The Committee on the Bill instanced a case where a man is employed in London at £20 p.w., a woman in London at £16 p.w., a man in Scotland at £16 p.w., and a woman in Scotland at £12 p.w., all by the same employer on the same work. Will the Act bring the woman in Scotland up to £20 p.w.? Or is it more likely that employers by concentrating all the women in the area which has the regional differential against it will evade the Act, thus giving rise to discriminatory job allocation. Further will the provision entitle all women to the minimum non-skilled male rate in e.g. the engineering industry, where no men are doing the lowest grade of the work done by women? Definition of "equivalent work" (2) A woman's work is "equivalent" to men's if her job and theirs have been given an equal value in terms of the demand made on a worker under various head- ings (for instance, effort, skill, decision) on a study undertaken with a view to evaluating in those terms the jobs to be done by all or any of the employees in an undertaking or group of undertakings, or would have been given equal value but for the evaluation being made on a system setting different values for men and women on the same demand under any heading. The provision does not impose an obligation on the employer to have a job evaluation done, it just says that when it has been done, there shall be no discrim- ination. We do not know if it matters how long ago the work was rated as equivalent. Since all employers con- duct their own evaluations in one way or another, how sophisticated is the evaluation in the Act to be? No particular method is preferred and there are significant shifts in emphasis in the various recognised methods, job-ranking, grade-description or classification, factor

comparison or points rating. Discrimination could very easily be built into job evaluation, since the Act does not deal with discrimination built in to the relative weighting of factors, for example, if a job evaluation scheme gives relatively high weight to strength and rela- tively low weight to dexterity, would this not be discrim- ination? This sort of indirect discrimination was noted as one of three major insufficiencies still existent in the original EEC member countries in the Commission's Report on 31 December 1968. (Particular reference might be made to German practice in this regard.) There are instances of "reorganisation" of work in Northern Ireland following the Equal Pay Act, women have now been described as "equal but separate" (see a report in The Irish Press 8 October 1972). J o b evaluation It will be important to clarify the question of job evaluation. If no duty is imposed upon an employer to carry out such a scheme, then the number of women in Ireland who will be forced to rely on the first principle will be proportionately as great as the English figure. In discussions on the English Bill, the suggestion was launched that one-third of all employees (approx.) were covered by job evaluation schemes. The National Board for Prices and Incomes published a report on Job Evaluation in 1968, based on a survey of the use of evaluation in the UK. "Although" the report says "most establishments have made no use of job evalua- tion some 7£ per cent of establishments covered by the survey not using job evaluation were actively consid- ering its application. If these establishments too apply job evaluation to an again nearly 60 per cent of their workers the coverage of such techniques will rise over the next few years from nearly 25 per cent of the employees in our sample to about a third." However, taking into acctunt that the survey covered only those concerns employing twenty-five or more employees while many women work in concerns employing less than that number, and also remembering that industries tending to use job evaluation show a marked difference in the low figures of female employees, it has been estimated that no more than 1 million women employees in the UK and probably no more than 500,000 are covered by job evaluation schemes. With a total female labour force in the UK of 9 million, 1 million of which are in receipt of equal pay, this leaves roughly 7 million who will not be in a position to benefit from this part of the Act. Clearly such a result must be avoided in Ireland. (3) A collective agreement under the Equal Pay Act can be referred to the Industrial Court by the parties to the agreement o rby the Secretary of State. The parties to the agreement in England no less than in Ireland will usually be men and this may prove unfor- tunate for the referral of collective agreements for amendment to the Court. Women trade unionists will simply have to become alert. In Ireland there are seven full-time women officials out of a total of 230. The pro- portion of tEade union members was last ascertained in 1966 to be, among women, two out of every five, and among men, two out of every three. In the UK, density of unionisation is approx. 60 per cent for males as opposed to 28 per cent for females. There is a rather strong case for equal pay in Ireland in the private as well as in the public sector. Women constitute approx. one quarter of the Irish labour force, Continued on p. 98 96