Job evaluation under scrutiny: what pay transparency laws mean for unionised workforces

Two recent disputes show how closely job evaluation is now being examined.

In 2025 refuse workers at a large English city council went on strike over the council's decision to remove one job role. The council said keeping the role exposed it to equal pay claims because it was mainly done by men. By October 2026 the dispute had run for 21 months.

In the Asda equal pay litigation, the hearing on whether store jobs were of equal value to depot jobs lasted 58 days. Most of the evidence came from experts on how levels of demand should be defined for each factor and how the demands of each role compared.

Both disputes turn on how jobs are valued against one another and whether that valuation can be defended. Pay transparency laws are likely to make these questions more frequent. Under the EU Pay Transparency Directive, gap reporting, joint pay assessments and information rights all depend on how jobs have been grouped and valued. Current UK proposals would let tribunals and a proposed new enforcement unit require job evaluation itself.

The result is scrutiny at three levels. Process asks whether an organisation can show who supplied the evidence, who agreed the criteria, who made each decision and whether governance arrangements were followed. Methodology asks whether the factor definitions, levels, weightings and scoring rules measure the demands of work consistently and without gender bias. Outcomes ask whether the resulting comparisons and job categories are defensible and whether pay differences between them have been investigated.

The three levels are related but separate. Good records show how decisions were made without proving that the methodology is free of bias. A sound methodology still has to be applied consistently. A consistent evaluation helps establish which jobs are of equal value. Any resulting pay difference must then be assessed separately under the applicable equal pay rules.

Unionised workforces are at the centre of all three levels because unions often jointly own the schemes under examination and are also among those bringing claims.

What the law now asks of job evaluation

Directive (EU) 2023/970 had to be transposed by 7 June 2026. By mid-October 2026, transposition trackers listed five member states as having fully transposed the Directive: Slovakia, Lithuania, Italy, Malta and Greece. Most of Greece's provisions are scheduled to take effect on 1 November 2026.

Four provisions bear directly on job evaluation:

• Article 4(4): pay structures must enable an assessment of whether workers are in a comparable situation regarding the value of work. The assessment uses objective, gender-neutral criteria agreed with workers' representatives where they exist. The criteria include skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions, with other job-relevant factors added where appropriate. They must be applied in an objective, gender-neutral manner and relevant soft skills must not be undervalued.

• Article 6: the criteria used to set pay, pay levels and pay progression must be accessible to workers.

• Article 7: workers can request average pay levels by sex for categories of workers doing the same work as them or work of equal value.

• Articles 9 and 10: gap reporting by category of workers. A joint pay assessment is required if a gap of 5% or more in a category is neither justified on objective, gender-neutral grounds nor remedied within six months.

Those categories are built from the same objective criteria. The quality of the job evaluation behind them shapes everything that follows.

The UK is moving in a similar direction by a different route. Under section 131(6) of the Equality Act 2010, a job evaluation study that rates two jobs differently will defeat an equal value claim unless there are reasonable grounds to suspect the study is based on a system that discriminates because of sex or is otherwise unreliable.

The UK government's consultation on equal pay reform, published in July 2026, closes on 27 October 2026. Its proposals are not yet law. They include requiring a tribunal that finds a breach of equal pay law to order a non-discriminatory job evaluation scheme where the employer does not already have an up-to-date one. The consultation also proposes an Equal Pay Regulatory and Enforcement Unit involving trade unions, employers and other stakeholders. One of its proposed powers is to require a job evaluation scheme or an equal pay audit during an investigation. A further proposal would extend equal pay-style protection to race and disability.

Scrutiny of process

National laws are turning the Directive's link to workers' representatives into specific rights. The Dutch bill, due for parliamentary debate in January 2027, would give works councils a consent right over establishing, amending or withdrawing the job evaluation system. The same right would cover how employee categories are classified and the approach to unjustified pay differences.

The city council involved in the refuse strike shows a jointly run process in practice. For its current evaluation exercise, a working group of council officers and trade union representatives has overseen the gathering of job information. Job descriptions are reviewed by line managers and signed off by job holders before roles are evaluated against the 13 factors of the NJC scheme.

Implementation carries its own risks. A Scottish council approved a new pay and grading structure in August 2026 for implementation from April 2027. A union spokesperson said unions had spent eight years working with the council on an equality-proofed scheme. The same spokesperson warned that phased implementation would leave one in five employees on the old structure.

In each case the record of who agreed what, on which job information and when is becoming part of the evidence.

Scrutiny of methodology

The Directive's four factor areas and its soft skills safeguard set a minimum content test for any scheme. In March 2026 the European Commission and the European Institute for Gender Equality published updated EU-wide guidelines on gender-neutral job evaluation and classification. The step-by-step toolkit is intended to help employers translate the principle of work of equal value into practical assessment and classification processes. It breaks the four factor areas into subfactors and includes tools for trade unions and employees. The non-binding guidelines reinforce the importance of examining how evaluation criteria are defined and applied instead of relying solely on the existence of a formal scheme.

National guidance is also emerging. A Greek guide published in April 2026 points to frequently overlooked skills such as communication, emotional effort and managing several tasks at once.

Eurofound gives a simple illustration of what a gender-neutral review can change. A specialised cleaner role held mainly by men scores 75 points. A maintenance cleaner role held mainly by women scores 73 points and is paid less. The two are treated as equal value and merged into one category with the lower rate raised to match.

The harder questions concern schemes that come from collective agreements. These cover around 60% of employees in the EU. Eurofound found that reviews of pay scales in some agreements took more than a decade and did not always apply a gender lens. Member states are taking different positions on how far to rely on them.

Italy's Legislative Decree 96/2026 presumes that applying a national collective agreement signed by the comparatively most representative unions conforms with equal pay principles, subject to proof of individual discrimination. Some commentators question whether contractual classification alone meets the Directive's requirement to look at the substance of the work.

Germany's existing presumption of appropriateness for collectively agreed pay systems is contested. The government's expert commission was split, with the majority favouring a presumption and a minority considering it contrary to EU law.

Sweden paused transposition in March 2026, citing administrative burden and a lack of flexibility for its collective bargaining model. It is seeking renegotiation of the Directive at EU level.

The test is also widening beyond sex. The Scottish council's stated aim in adopting its current scheme was a system free from bias on gender and five other protected characteristics. That broader test is likely to become more common as the UK moves towards equal pay rights for race and disability.

Scrutiny of outcomes

Reporting by category means a single category can trigger a joint pay assessment even where the organisation's overall gap is low.

The UK retail claims show why an equal value finding is only one stage. In January 2025 the Asda tribunal found that 12 of 14 lead claimant roles had established equal value. A further 24 non-lead roles followed in March 2026. Whether the pay differences are justified will be decided separately at the material factor stage, scheduled to begin in November 2026.

The Next case shows how that second stage can play out. Store roles had already been found to be of equal value to warehouse roles. In September 2026 the Employment Appeal Tribunal accepted that recruitment and retention pressures justified the higher basic pay for warehouse roles on the facts of the case. Findings against Next on other pay terms, including paid rest breaks, were not overturned.

The English city council shows the financial scale of equal pay exposure. In 2023 it estimated liabilities of up to £760m, a figure that contributed to its section 114 notice. Its 2025 framework agreement with two unions is expected to pay out more than £250m. With the refuse strike still unresolved in October 2026, a councillor asked for a commitment that any deal would not create new equal pay or sex discrimination liabilities.

Why unionised workforces face particular exposure

These threads come together most sharply in unionised workforces. Unions there are both joint owners of schemes and among those testing them. The local government schemes used by both councils come from national joint councils of employers and unions. The English council's current evaluation runs under an addendum signed by its three recognised unions. Unions have also backed the Asda claims.

Joint agreement adds legitimacy to a scheme. Under EU and UK law the scheme and its application remain open to challenge. In a jointly governed scheme the union's own past agreements may be examined alongside the employer's decisions.

Bargaining also produces pay elements outside the scheme, such as allowances, premiums and role-specific arrangements. The Next case and the refuse strike show these being tested against equal value results. Eurofound notes that agreements do less to support equal pay compliance where actual pay drifts above agreed minimum rates.

Information rights add a further layer. Workers' representatives can request clarification of reported pay data and take a direct role in joint pay assessments.

Practical controls

Taken together, the three levels point to a set of practical controls for jointly governed schemes:

• Decision traceability: retaining the evidence, reasoning, scores, changes and approvals behind each evaluation, including how the criteria were agreed.

• Consistency monitoring: comparing scoring patterns across panels, departments and comparable roles.

• Change management: recording when roles change materially and when reassessment is needed.

• Bias testing: checking factor definitions, levels and weightings for gender bias, including how soft skills are captured.

• Pay outcome analysis: linking evaluation results to pay data, allowances and premiums so that disparities can be investigated, with reporting categories built from evaluation results.

• Wider protected characteristics: in the UK, preparing for equal pay rights that extend beyond sex.

Conclusion

Job evaluation has often been treated as a technical exercise for reward teams and joint panels. The direction of current regulation in the EU and the UK is increasingly towards treating it as evidence that has to be explained to workers, unions, regulators and tribunals. The quality of an evaluation decision and the ability to demonstrate that quality are coming to be assessed together. In unionised workforces that evidence is created jointly and can be challenged from either side. The organisations likely to be best placed are those that can show how their scheme was agreed, how it has been applied and what it has produced.

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