…the gossip

When negotiations with PSIS concluded in March one of the things Finsec members won was a commitment from PSIS to undertake a role and relativity review. Finsec believes this review allows the campaign for pay parity at PSIS 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.

Finsec has written to PSIS about the second phase of this role and relativity review. It’s 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.

(thanks to aheavens for the photo)