A couple of city council jobs currently on offer to compare and contrast…
First up, we have a Night Care Assistant required at Concord Lodge, a residential assessment unit for adults who have learning difficulties and who may present “a challenge”. The salary for this post is just £12,372 a year or around £6.34 an hour.
For this magnificent sum, paying barely a pound an hour above the minimum wage and at least £5 an hour less than the alleged average wage, you must work nights and take on the responsibility to “consistently ensure residents health, safety, dignity, privacy and independence is promoted”.
Perhaps then, you might prefer to try your luck as an Equalities and Community Cohesion Officer in the Chief Executive’s Department? You can start on a cool £29,859 or £15.31 an hour – way above the alleged average wage.
And what massive responsibilities do you have to take on to earn this considerable sum? Er, just organise some work placements in the council for black and disabled people!
It’s revealing that this job ad in what the Chief Exec now instructs us to call “equalities and social cohesion” makes no mention of economic inequalities or – I better whisper it – class inequalities.
This post is absolutely spot on! There have been rumours of the equalities team not entirely recruiting objectively before now as well. Certainly most if not all of the team is representative of an equalities community, more than one would expect if opportunities were to be truly demographically equal.
Their impact on council procedures is minimal as well, which is a crying shame for those who actually genuinely support equal opportunities.
From my experience in that area, these depts really come across as a middle-class job creation scheme.
Amelium- are you saying that the equalities team members are not actually representative of Bristol’s population?
Doesn’t GMB union-warrior Rowena Hayward work as a seniorish officer in the Equalities Department of the Council? Perhaps she has some comment on this?
Any employer will essentially pay the minimum necessary to be able to recruit and retain adequate staff. The UK isn’t China, and no-one is compelled to take a job that they don’t wish to take. If no-one successfully applied for the Night Care Assistant post, the Council would be forced to re-advertise and offer a higher rate of pay. Anyone who does apply must surely therefore consider that the combination of the pay, opportunities for progression, working conditions and the expected level of job satisfaction are fair compensation, otherwise they wouldn’t bother.
Incidentally, I think it’s rather flippant to characterise the Equalities Officer post as being merely ‘[organising] some work placements in the council’; one of the responsibilities is to keep on top of the relevant legislation, which is hard enough to do in my own field, let alone something as politically charged as Equalities. If you have a complaint here, blame central government for their impulsive reflex to pass new laws on anything and everything…
GMB firebrand Rowena Hayward is always going on about ‘low paid women workers’ in the Council.
Obvioulsy her own colleagues are not in this category!