WRC Rejects Equal Pay Claim: No Work of Equal Value Established
Background
The Complainant, a Contract and Procurement Specialist, through her Union submitted a complaint about having been denied equal pay on gender and family grounds.
She named a colleague as her chosen comparator who ultimately presented as a witness at the hearing.
Summary of Complainant’s Case
The Complainant, was employed on the Respondent site since April 2000 and remained in live employment as the claim was determined.
The Complainant was the sole female in her work area, and she had family status through her three children.
The Respondent Oil Company operated a Salary Grading System incorporating the Hay Methodology as the measurement tool.
In March 2022, through her Union, the Complainant submitted a complaint under the Employment Equality Act that she had been denied equal pay on gender and family grounds, naming a former colleague as her comparator, who was male and had a different family status.
The Complainant submitted that there was no justification for her to be earning less than a co- worker as they were both Contract Specialists with the only difference being the management of different categories of spend.
The Complainant outlined that she had been a long-serving Employee since April 2000. By March 2007, she commenced a Project Controller role in Procurement at Grade 12. By 2009, she had completed a Law Degree (Hons) and commenced the Contracts and Procurement Specialist role. She requested a grade change from 2010 onwards through her line manager.
Unsuccessful in securing the grade change, the Complainant pursued this objective through bi-annual requests to her line manager, who deferred to the human resource dept. Impeded by the lack of a job description for her current role, the Complainant completed her own job description and submitted it for consideration for upgrade.
In March 2021, the Complainant was regraded at grade 13, but due to pay pause / covid 19 / operational matters, the pay associated with grade 13 was not applied to her at that time. Later in March 2021, Complainant submitted a grievance seeking a further review in light of the persistent requests for historical upgrades from 2007, a rightful grade 14 due to operational changes at the business and latterly her discovery that her colleague had commenced the role of Contract Specialist in December 2019 at an automatic grade 13. Their volume of work was similar in style, and the roles were ‘pretty much identical.’
She linked her grade disparity to her pause in professional career due to family commitments.
Summary of Respondent’s Case
The Respondent denied the claim for equal pay. The Respondent outlined the Complainant’s service history from April 2000 to present day which covered a number of job titles and performance ratings.
The Respondent acknowledged that the Oil Refinery Industry is comprised of a predominantly male workforce. The Refinery was keen to hire female Employees and submitted that it hosts a number of benefits for supporting family friendly working, all of which the Complainant had availed of.
- Enhanced maternity benefit to full pay for 26 weeks
- Parental leave in units of days
- Flexible Work Policy
The Respondent outlined the Complainant’s career history with the Organisation and noted that by November 2017, she was working as a Contracts and Procurement Specialist.
She had begun to negotiate rates on contracts, working to the overall responsibility for negotiations on larger contracts.
From February 2019 to October 2019, the Complainant completed a template for job evaluation under the Hay Method (skill, effort, responsibility, working conditions and pay equity complaint and gender-neutral evaluation system).
The Respondent submitted that there was a clear distinction between her role and that of the comparator she identified. The Respondent argued that the Complainant was not engaged in like work, similar work and /or work of equal value and/ or that the differences (if any) in pay were attributable to grounds unconnected with the Complainant’s gender or family status.
The Respondent submitted that the Complainant did not satisfy the burden of proof as her historical arguments predated her comparator’s appointment. The Respondent stated that there were clear distinctions between the jobs of the Complainant and the comparator. There were distinguishing features other than gender explaining why the comparator was placed on a different pay band.
Findings and Conclusions
The Adjudicator noted that it was in the competency framework that the parties were most apart. The Complainant stated the posts were identical in every way. The Respondent differed and submitted that the Organisation required more complexity, more commercial risk management and more q/s skills to credibly manage the construction contract’s function, where variations could prove very costly.
The Complainant disagreed and submitted that she walked in the shoes of her comparator on a number of occasions.
The Adjudicator noted that by her own admission, the Complainant marked the contract specialist role as different to hers in conversation throughout a grievance process in 2021.
The Adjudicator also noted that the comparator participated in larger scale projects than the Complainant.
While they both sat in same office and worked the same hours, the Adjudicator noted a perpetual difference in the work undertaken by the Complainant year on year over the reference period.
And although the Complainant did provide cover for the comparator during absences, it was also notable that a locum was secured when the Complainant went on maternity leave. The Adjudicator thus concluded that she simply could not have absorbed both her role and the comparator’s roles simultaneously.
There were some similarities in the job, such as base, hours of work, some cross cover and reaching out to vendors and suppliers. However, the Adjudicator found that the Comparator was engaged in ‘more strategic and innovative work at a senior level’ than the Complainant.
The Adjudicator noted that it was very difficult to be a judge in your own cause when it comes to your everyday work. The Complainant had not demonstrated that she carried out the work aligned with the Comparator’s grade nor did she demonstrate familiarity with QS methodology, an area much coveted by the Respondent.
The Adjudicator concluded that the Complainant gave insufficient weighting to the commercial reality of the covid 19-related pay pause and did not seek a rebalancing exercise in retrospection once that pay pause lifted which may have prompted an equilibrium much earlier.
The Adjudicator was satisfied that the Respondent relied on the historical grade to ground the Contract Specialist Construction role and was entitled to pay a different rate of pay for a time compared to that paid to the Complainant in her role as Contract Specialist Professional Services and Procurement Excellence as they were not engaged in ‘like work’ or ‘work of equal value’ and this decision was not tainted by discrimination on grounds of gender .
The Complainant did not establish a prima facie case of discrimination as required by S85A of the Employment Equality Act as she did not establish that she performed like work or work of equal value in respect of her named comparator.
Decision
The Complainant did not establish a prima facie case of discrimination as required by S85A of the Employment Equality Act and the claim for discrimination was therefore not well founded.
Recommendations
This decision highlights how Organisations must be in a position to provide clear evidence of the key differences between ostensibly similar roles that have different pay levels. Roles should be assessed against objective, gender-neutral criteria such as skill, responsibility, and commercial impact. With new pay transparency obligations coming into effect from June 2026, the risk of equal pay claims is likely to rise, particularly where Organisations cannot clearly demonstrate the objective, gender-neutral basis for pay differentials between Employees doing work of equal value. Proactive reviews of job evaluation frameworks, pay setting practices, and supporting documentation is therefore essential to mitigate legal and reputational risk.