PSIS Update
2 August 2007
KEY POINTS:
- At negotiations this year PSIS agreed to undertake a Role and Relativity Review. We hope the results of this review will support our claim for pay parity with bank workers.
- The second phase of this review is scheduled to begin next month. Finsec has requested that PSIS use the government approved gender-neutral job evaluation tool to evaluate job roles and pay levels at PSIS.
ACTION:
We can continue to win changes and move towards pay parity with bank workers if we continue to grow our membership and negotiating power. Please ask all new staff members who started at PSIS in the last six months to consider joining Finsec and our campaign for pay parity with bank workers.
Moving on from negotiations
It has now been over four months since employment negotiations concluded and we last communicated with you. Interestingly none of the major banks that have negotiated in that space of time have made a base pay offer as high as the pay offer that we won in PSIS. We believe that our success is due to our commitment to grow our membership and grow our activism.
Role and Relativity Review
The other thing that we won at our negotiations in March was a commitment from PSIS to undertake a role and relativity review. We believe this review allows our campaign for pay parity to continue. The first phase of the review was to review current job roles in the branches, and propose changes arising out of the strategic focus of the business. The second phase was to do an evaluation of job roles, and conduct an external market relativity comparison for each role benchmarking against the financial services sector market. This should be completed by the end of March 2008.
Equitable Job Evaluation
We have written to PSIS about the second phase of this role and relativity review. We are requesting that PSIS use the recently developed Equitable Job Evaluation System (EJE), which has been specifically designed by New Zealand's own Department of Labour to capture all of the relevant information about jobs and to minimise gender bias in implementation.
EJE was originally designed to capture the nature and contribution of a range of female dominated-occupations in the public service, health and education sectors. Banking and Finance is also a female-dominated profession that would benefit from a gender-neutral job evaluation. 85% of Finsec members at PSIS are women. Other job evaluation tools, such as the Hay evaluation tool commonly used by some employers have been accused of under valuing the work done in female dominated jobs.
A team of job evaluation and equity experts developed EJE. It has been reviewed locally and by international experts and tested on real jobs within a New Zealand public service organisation. It is the official job evaluation tool for New Zealand's many public servants.
Its development and use has been supported by a range of New Zealand unions, including the Public Service Association.
From the Union Council
