To think warehouse workers and shop assistants have very different jobs?

Neither of these jobs are "easier" or "harder", they just suit different people.

Some people would hate to deal with the public and would rather be physically active.

Some people are well suited to public-facing job and would hate pushing boxes around a warehouse all day.

Why do you feel they should be paid differently? I'd say they require around equal amounts of time/ commitment/ skill in different ways and are on around the same level.

I think we as women often think more manual jobs are 'harder' as our innate strength, or rather relative lack of it compared with men, is against us.

What we fail to recognise is that women tend to be better at some other skills (as a group, possibly due to socialisation) and also tend to more often want (often due to childcare or elderly care needs) shorter working hours.

Employers take advantage of the latter and we sell ourselves short with the former.

The higher pay for bin lorry drivers is due to the need to have LGV licence which is harder to get than fork lift trucks etc.

Plus also pushing around stinking bins and shift work, although the latter also applying to retail and warehouse of course.

But it's incredibly disappointing to see so many people arguing against the need to pay women as much as men for work that has been repeatedly determined to be of equal value in court.

And being physically fit is not a skill. Be an Amazon picker. You walk bloody miles every day and it is low paid job.

The physical demands are the same as shelf stacking. You use forklift trucks for really heavy loads, and forklift truck drivers are paid more than warehouse workers.

I'm not sure about that. A lot of warehouse work can be quite heavy, and even size can make a difference. People who are even a little less fit or smaller can more easily get hurt.

I am quite happy with male dominated workplaces, I was in the military for years and I liked it fine. I wouldn't like to work in a warehouse though (doing warehouse specific work), and a lot of that is down to the physical demands of the job. Of course that just fine for some women, but on average, more of them might struggle, especially as they move past youth. Also - a lot of heavy dangerous jobs are not great during pregnancy so some women get out of them and sometimes don't go back.

But the other element with this is, not all warehouse jobs are the same. Some aren't that physical, and it's a perfectly nice environment. But others are high volume fast work very physical, very uncomfortable.

I think comparing across sectors is very fraught and really artificial.

Who says they don't understand it? Maybe they just don't think it's making valid comparisons?

I think it's more that there are more people in the pool of those who could do the job.

Competition for positions mean there is not much need to increase the wage.

Both men and women are equally able to do something like check out groceries, say, unlike when I was growing up you often see men in these positions now.

But if work is very heavy, there are fewer people, man and women who can do it. If they are likely to do things like put their backs out more often that is also a contributing factor.

They have to offer more to get the positions filled with people who are not doofuses.

Surely that’s a historical cultural thing though - warehouses were and probably still are(?) more likely to be the workplaces of men? As a student I had a summer job in a warehouse fixing mobile phones and other than me, it was all men. I didn’t enjoy the job precisely because it was such a male environment, I am referring to the early 00s so things have probably changed.

@LucasNorth1 that is not what is happening!! Routinely jobs done by women are devalued. Look at nursery workers. Many are just above minimum wage, they have a qualification, have to follow the regulatory framework of OFSTED, and deliver the EFYS curriculum. And yet their pay does not reflect the level of qualification or skills.

Yes, this.

It's not a;; that straightforward to calculate value of work like that anyway, in terms of what each worker is producing financially. Partly because the price of the products is set in large part by the costs of production. So the whole idea of calculating the value of the work is backward. The cost of the work determines the value of the product.

when young

Maybe more women would work in the warehouses if they were given toy diggers.

i think part of it is some see certain tasks more challenging than other tasks and then think it should be x for x tasks and eg higher or lower for x tasks, i guess its the argument of why should someone aspire to be better or work harder eg if they were all paid the same as the CEO vs eg the self stacker. (rightly or wrongly that's my basic understanding of the points some people have)

Very sad to see so many people who do not understand equal pay legislation and why it is so important.

II do think that there can be some significant differences in these jobs. They are similar in that they don't really require any special education, you need to be a good worker, average intelligence, in reasonable health.

Warehouses of course aren't public facing, but they can be much more physically demanding, dangerous, and in some cases the environmental conditions are worse. (eg, not air conditioning, customer facing roles usually have things like a/c, good lighting etc.)

In a lot of ways I think it's actually quite artificial to try and make wages equivalent across differernt jobs like this. If I want to gire ten warehouse workers and ten shop assistants, and offer the same wage, and I get ten good applicants for the shop job, and none for the warehouse job - well, that suggests that people are not willing to work in a warehouse for that wage.

Maybe more people like shop work, maybe it is harder to find people fit enough for the warehouse, but I don't know if you can really argue with what workers will accept, or not.

Maybe the people who say they are the same should try moving their shop workers over to warehouses? It would be interesting to see how that would work out.

Which is utterly ridiculous. Employers pay the minimum they need to to fill their vacancies and attract workers in to the job. If they need to offer a higher wage to get people into the warehouse then that's why they've done it. Not because they think the warehouse work is more important.

ill admit at present i love the warehouse but currently being made redundant, i can agree with equal pay because different roles different skills but different stresses etc, personally i love the warehouse (at least the warehouse role i currently do)

Both jobs require the same level of skill (albeit different skills) so should have parallel pay scales.

The idea that a job that requires more brute strength should be paid more is simply valuing traditionally male jobs over traditionally female jobs.

It's shocking really - how long ago was this?

I had similar experience working for BT in the nineties, telephone engineers, 99% male, were paid a lot more than clerical staff, 99% female, but entry requirements /qualifications to do the clerical roles was higher-5 GCSE/ O levels for office workers but just 2 GCSEs / O levels for the engineers. ( you'd probably need a degree to do either job now!)

I'm pleased it's now changing and employers are being pulled up on it as female dominated roles are often undervalued and underpaid and it's been going on too long

With these type of jobs this would often be the base salary before overtime etc. Glassdoor says £32,998. Totaljobs says £32,500. Gov.uk says £34k for an experienced driver.

But as with everything it varies between companies. I earn around £50k driving trucks in the construction sector. My mate earns around £65k driving fuel tankers, and many pallet companies are still paying £30-35k.

I've no doubt bus drivers get killed at work but it's not in the top 10 most dangerous jobs as waste operatives consistently are - with companies like Biffa you're both a loader and driver as most working on the trade waste work as a one man team.

The precedent was set decades ago as @TizerorFizz explains - it’s hardly new!

Years ago I worked in a boots store. I made friends with someone who worked in one of their warehouses. It didn’t bother me much that she had a higher hourly rate (although we were both same age, unskilled, working part-time while at uni) but it really irritated me that she had better terms and conditions- unsocial hours payments for Saturdays and double time on Sundays, whereas in the shops we only got straight time on Saturdays and 1.5 on Sundays.

Different jobs is not relevant. Its value of the job to the company that matters. It’s how the value of the contribution is calculated that matters. In many organisations, all departments have to work together. Sales people cannot sell anything if doesn’t arrive in store. The warehouse does nothing if the goods aren’t imported or purchased. So everything and every job is linked. The skill and fairness is recognising which cogs have a higher value than others. Some are, inevitably the same and salary should reflect this.

They are different jobs but difficult in different ways. Warehouse workers do not deal with abusive or violent customers for a start.