Equality at stake

The outgoing chief executive of the Universities and Colleges Employers' Association made a despairing and feeble attempt to justify his plans to impose an inappropriate job evaluation system on academic and academic related staff (THES, June 20). Hera (Higher Education Role Analysis) is presented as a means to promote equal opportunities and to achieve equal pay for work of equal value.

Yet it is designed: i) to provide employers with a prima facie defence against even justified equal pay claims; ii) to introduce new, discrimination-prone distinctions into pay structures, eg a new distinction between big and small lecturers' jobs; and iii) to disrupt national pay scales and to promote the emergence of new and even more discrimination-prone local pay determination arrangements.

Hera is also presented as the outcome of a process of consultation with the Association of University Teachers and others. Yet, throughout the development of the scheme, the UCEA has consistently refused to negotiate with the association on the implications of job evaluation for pay and pay determination arrangements. In a recent memo to AUT (May 29, 1997) Steve Rouse makes it clear that he will not contemplate negotiation until after the Hera pilot schemes have been imposed.

Mr Rouse finished his letter by making what he described as a fair offer, probably the fairest I have heard since he made a 1.5 per cent pay offer, and then reduced it! Let me respond with a fairer one - that both sides enter into serious and substantive negotiations immediately on the development of new national arrangements for the grading and career progression of university professional staff which will ensure equality of opportunity and equal pay for work of equal value. In order that negotiations can proceed in a spirit of harmony and cooperation the UCEA will, of course, need to give guarantees that there will be no further unilateral management action to pilot or impose Hera without consent. You cannot get fairer than that, can you?

Alan Carr

Chair of employment committee, Association of University Teachers