Evaluation and payment of work

There are two fundamental levels which have to be distinguished in the evaluation of work:

Description and financial evaluation of typical duties in a pay system:
This level involves developing a differentiated system of job descriptions and thus a differentiated pay system for industries and sectors of employment.
Evaluation of an individual job or an individual function and allocating it to an existing pay grade or pay group:
This level involves the systematic and complete description of the work that should be done and weighting it according to its requirement grade without regard to any individual member of staff. This job description then facilitates allocation within a pay system and at the same time provides the basis for a requirements profile for the staff selection process.

Gender-related errors and systematic bias can occur at both of these levels, which as a rule result in jobs traditionally done by women being undervalued. This is a significant cause of pay differentials between women and men, which continue to be wide. This form of structural discrimination has long been prohibited under national and European law.

Description and financial evaluation of typical duties in a pay system

When typical duties are being described and financially evaluated, care must be taken that not only jobs that are the same or very nearly the same but also jobs of equivalent value are given the same financial evaluation. This is established in Article 141 of the Amsterdam Treaty and in Directives 75/117/EEC and 97/80/EC and has been implemented by relevant adjudication of the European Court of Justice and the German Federal Employment Court.

In pay systems that have grown up over time, such as most collective agreements and the system of civil service pay, however, work traditionally done primarily by women is accorded less worth than work traditionally done primarily by men and is accordingly lower paid. This has been proved, for example, in an exhaustive study (Winter 1997) for the Federal Collective Agreement for Public Employees (BAT). There are two main reasons for this:

In the negotiations leading up to these pay systems, the interests of male workers were more strongly represented. Men have been and still are more heavily organized into trade unions and until a few years ago were greatly in the majority in the civil service. Moreover, negotiators (almost always men) tend to think implicitly along the lines of the male breadwinner model and have very little awareness of issues of gender equality.
In most pay systems, there is no systematic and testable procedure for evaluating jobs which ensures the same evaluation for work of the same value.

Job evaluation processes thus have a key role in determining which jobs are of equivalent value and must therefore be paid the same.

Evaluation and grading of individual jobs or functions

New types of job are frequently introduced into organizations in connection with restructuring and the introduction of new forms of work and organizational forms. For instance, teams of employees are formed within the framework of Business Process Reengineering, which go thoroughly through each individual business process. This breaks down traditional functional divisions of labor and introduces a new differentiation between core processes and support processes. These new jobs must be evaluated according to their requirements and graded in a differentiated pay system. The organization and individual members of staff or the staff representation may have differences of opinion here, which may even result in court cases. Different gender-related evaluations may have an important part to play here. There is not only a tendency to fill positions that are less demanding and with fewer possibilities for development with women, but positions filled by women in such restructuring processes are also inappropriately evaluated. If grading is going to be transparent and result in the same pay for work of the same value, then a structured job evaluation process is needed.

Example of gender equality-oriented re-evaluation of work

Attempts have been made in individual cases to re-evaluate all jobs and award appropriate pay at the level of the organization. The Canton of Freiberg in Switzerland, for instance, has undertaken a gender equality-oriented re-evaluation of the jobs of its entire staff (German site). For this, an analysis was made in the first instance of the distribution of duties and pay grades by gender and the pay of women was compared with the pay of men. The gender equality-oriented process to re-evaluate jobs was carried out at all stages with the equal participation of women and men. At the same time, the goal of the process was communicated to all staff and all involved were made aware of the gender-related aspects of it. After a process lasting several years, some 8 % of the staff had been re-graded. Women were the main, but not the only, beneficiaries of this.

Fachtagung "Diskriminierungsfreie Arbeitsbewertung und Eingruppierung im öffentlichen Dienst"

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erstellt von Administrator — zuletzt verändert: 02.01.2010 20:07

Evaluation and payment of work