I recently discovered I am being paid less for doing the same job as another colleague at another setting in the group. I feel this is very unfair, but I’m also worried about turning my employer against me. What should I do?
Equal Pay legislation will only protect individuals with regard to disparity of pay where there is a comparator of the opposite gender who performs broadly similar work but is paid more. It is possible for the individual to ask the employer questions to identify such comparators. Even if a comparator can be identified, an employer may have a defence for the difference in pay. There are often a number of potentially justifiable reasons why individual employees may be paid differently for a particular role, including qualifications, experience, location, job performance, skills and the market at the time of recruitment.
Where, however, there is disparity of pay between employees of the same gender, the Equal Pay legislation will not apply. Nonetheless, employees concerned about their pay can raise the issue with their employer through the grievance procedure.
Raising the matter as a formal grievance can sometimes entrench positions rather than address issues. Therefore, raising the matter informally in the first instance is often best. You could also wait until it is time for your performance review, when your salary may be up for discussion anyway, and raise it then.
We are having to make a few redundancies at the nursery and want to use length of service as the selection criteria. Is this still legally acceptable?
‘Last in, first out’ (LIFO) used to be a common method of redundancy selection, meaning that those with the least service would be selected for redundancy. It was a popular method, as it was a straightforward way of assessing who should be selected and avoided having to assess against factors such as performance and ability, which can often be emotive.
In recent years, LIFO has fallen out of favour as a standalone method of selection, as placing too much weight on length of service can result in successful claims for unfair dismissal, sex discrimination and age discrimination. This is due to it often being demonstrated that the section of the workforce with less service are younger employees or women, which in turn gives an indirect discriminatory effect.
So, length of service should not be used as a sole criterion but one of a number of selection criteria or as a tie-break in the event of selection scores being otherwise equal.
