YP Comment: Junior doctors and fair pay for anti-social shift work

WHILE doctors are striking to gain recognition of weekend shifts as unsocial hours, other workers are having their Saturday and Sunday premiums pared away as their employers seek to fund the increasing minimum wage.

Such pay supplements have served two sometimes conflicting purposes. One, much favoured by trade unions, was to boost overall pay, with formulae as generous as “time-and-a-half” or even “double-time” being standard.

The other was to ease the process of allocating shifts, with the cash differential balancing out the downside of less popular shifts. The higher rates often had an inverting effect, with staff feeling disgruntled that they were not being rostered for their fair share of Sundays rather than that they were being asked to work too many.

The two purposes could be separated by making the total wage bill independent of the unsocial hours premiums. The pay rate defined in contracts and by the minimum wage would apply to the average pay rate for a group of staff over all their shifts worked within a particular pay period.

It would then be a straightforward matter for payroll software to combine the data on shifts worked in that period with the pre-defined average rate and premium percentages to give the basic weekday rate and from that the rates for other days.

Other premiums and perhaps discounts could be set for shifts such as waking nights and sleeping nights.

The premiums can then be tweaked on a purely pragmatic basis to mimimise wrangling and resentment over who gets “good” shifts and who is landed with “bad” ones.

Pension unfairness

From: Colin Clarke, The Crescent, Stamford Bridge, York.

THE basic state pension discriminates on age by introducing a significant difference in payment levels. The rates in April 2016 being £155.65 for a man born on or after April 6, 1951, compared to £118.84 (£115.95 with 2.5 per cent rise) per week for a man born before that date, 31 per cent higher.

Many men born before April 6, 1951, will have left school at age 15 and worked until retiring at 65 and in less favourable working conditions than for later workers. The current retirement age is 65 years for men.

Age is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010 and there is a general rule that those who provide a public function, such as the DWP, should not discriminate on the basis of age. However, there are statutory exceptions within the Act in which the Equality Act 2010 would not apply.

Schedule 22 states that where there is an enactment relating to age, there is no contravention of the Act. The Department of Work and Pension have legislated in this area. In order to challenge or correct this situation, a test case may be needed or for Parliament to review the pensions. The appalling case for women has been discussed already in Parliament, MPs could now discuss the case for men.

Criminal use of figures

From: Nigel Boddy, Fife Road, Darlington.

IN a press conference on Monday, David Cameron made the ridiculous claim that crime has fallen by 25 per cent in his time in Government.

It is, of course, possible that reported crime might have fallen in that time because there are never enough of our over-worked, stressed, hard-pressed, outnumbered front line police officers available to take a complaint, when you try to make one.

Bizarrely these are the very statistics he will now use to justify further cuts in front line policing.

As former Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once said, there are lies, damned lies and statistics.

Will MPs quit over EU vote?

From: Terry Palmer, South Lea Avenue, Hoyland, Barnsley.

WE all now realise that our local Labour MPs no longer represent their constituents and are only interested in their own egos because, as ever, they know best, don’t they?

Well just suppose the great British public vote “out” to leave the corrupt and undemocratic EU. I know it’s hypothetical, 
but will every one of our local South Yorkshire Labour MPs who will be voting to stay “in” be doing the honourable thing and resigning their seats and go for re-election?

The lost Riding?

From: Jerry Holland, Upper Poppleton, York.

I WAS somewhat surprised on reading Ben Barnett’s article in Country Week (The Yorkshire Post, February 6) that a photograph had been taken in the borderlands where the old South and West Ridings of Yorkshire met.

As an incomer with only 36 years residence in the county, I was under the impression that the South Riding existed only in the fictional writing of Winifred Holtby and that there were only ever North, East and West Ridings of Yorkshire.