ABSTRACT
When job evaluation and formalised grading structures were being established in the post-war years, they were justified by a notion of fairness within internal labour markets. Fairness in this context meant that there was a systematic analysis or ranking of work processes, with coherent grading and pay structures based on the criteria determined and the information gathered about the jobs that people did within an organisation. Pay levels may have been benchmarked against the external labour market, but the overall approach was intended to provide an internal coherence in the treatment of one group of workers relative to another, or between one class of job and another. This concept of 'fairness' has to be located in its social context, which assumed differential treatment for men and for women; or for managerial, professional and administrative employees on the one hand as against craft, process workers and other manual workers on the other. As Sue Hastings has demonstrated in Chapter 4, the notion of 'fairness' could not be separated from the social values embodied in the notion of 'skill'. As these values mutated, so the 'fair' standards of early job evaluation processes were perceived to be distorted in favour of the skills that were traditionally exercised by men.
