Ruling on equal pay at Next - the road to hell is paved with good intentions....

[GreenTeaLikesMe]

Thousands of Next workers secure landmark £30 million equal pay victory (bmmagazine.co.uk)

"More than 3,500 current and former employees of fashion retailer Next have emerged victorious in a historic equal pay battle, marking the first successful claim of its kind against a major national retailer.
"After a six-year legal struggle, the Employment Tribunal ruled that the company had failed to justify paying its predominantly female sales consultants lower hourly wages than their male-dominated warehouse counterparts. This ruling could see Next facing compensation costs exceeding £30 million."

Roughly speaking, this goes well beyond the remit of what I'd consider "equal pay legislation." Historically, it was common for women to be paid less than men even when doing exactly the same work, and modern legislation rightly prevents companies from doing this. However, we seem to have moved onto a new level, in which companies can be forced to pay the same rate of pay for different jobs, on the grounds that "well, men more commonly do Job A while Job B is done mainly by women."

My own feelings are that a) no, working on the tills is not comparable with humping stuff about in a warehouse, especially when occupation risk is taken into account; b) women can and do work in warehouses if they want to; they are mostly not choosing to do so; c) this risks a lot of really dodgy downstream consequences, including the possibility that warehouse workers' wages could be pushed downwards as well, or the likelihood that more and more companies will close more brick-and-mortar branches of shops or services.

I wondered a similar thing about whether the pay in warehouses was more because the work was more physically demanding however Next were clearly not able to justify that in court. You could argue that working in a shop is more mentally demanding anyway.

You’re right that women can work in warehouses if they choose but most women don’t want to work in places where they are massively outnumbered by men for many reasons.

It’ll be interesting to see if other companies also change their pay structures based on this.

I know nothing about this case aside from what you have written here, but note that your concern that the (mens) warehouse jobs might be negatively effected by this apparent move towards equality, is an argument against pay equality that has been made since the dawn of time.

I have friends who have worked for NEXT they are a shitty company who have their staff on low wages and bare minimum of staff in store. ( while they buy other companies up and claim poverty)

They expect staff to do everything on the floor (not just stand at a till) with barely any staff. This is while on contracts which they change often through consultations and reduce hours given. They have no security and are constantly being shop lifted.

Rearranging shop furniture (moving and building rails) re stocking etc is still lifting and heavy work.They also can work in the warehouse/round the back and sorting the deliveries too. They now also have to deal with the online orders/returns parcels that arrive via the website.

More on costs for the companies so will further lose out to on line retailers who don't need to pay retail staff. The pay disparity may be due to simply supply and demand with few willing to do physically demanding warehouse work for long and therefore salaries have to be higher to attract staff not some covert means to suppress women s pay.

We rely on the market to determine salaries largely and discrimination pay settlements should be viewed cautiously in terms of economics. We don't have female footballers advocating for equal pay to men as that is simply unrelaistic . Possibly we have to have a little faith in market economics sometimes and the unfortunate realisation there are some physical jobs men will be a lot more suitable for.

The humping stuff around the warehouse, loading things into cages before they are moved onto the lorry...who do you think moves them from the lorry, humps it through the store and unloads it onto the shelves?

The warehouse workers don't have to deal with customers at the same time either!

You’ve clearly never worked in retail if you think it’s just serving customers.

There’s no difference in the physicality of the job, especially in Next where they also sell furniture.

Having worked in Next (a good amount of years ago) the conditions in the warehouse were not more difficult than the shop floor. I agree with this decision here, though not necessarily in other retailers/ supermarkets.

The delivery was dropped off inside the warehouse at the time, so the warehouse staff were not manhandling the delivery off the van.
The clothing boxes were unpacked in the back by that team, the shoes and accessories were unpacked by the shopfloor team, so both handling boxes. If the delivery was a large one, extra staff were poached from the shopfloor to help out in the back unpacking, and sometimes a sales assistant was put on the rota for a delivery shift.

As said above, the shop floor staff are also responsible for merchandising the area, which involved moving and setting up large floor equipment, moving rails and boxes of clothes about and often taking them away and putting them away in the stockroom. The floor staff also often back then (I do think this has changed for the main) had to go pick the replenishment. This often meant climbing up a very large ladder to get an armful of clothes from the top (our stockroom at the time was probably 1.5 times an average ceiling height, with some parts three layers of clothing high). We also had to go do this for any stock we wanted on the shopfloor, so say a style of jeans not currently out, that we wanted out, I think about 20 pairs fit on the bar to merchandise. So up a tall ladder, to the third / top layer of rails, to manoeuvre 20 pairs of jeans down ourselves. It's not a comfortable thing to do, and there wasn't any ladder training beyond checking for any broken rungs.

In the stores I was in, the warehouse did have female staff but were male heavy. This wasn't necessarily because of ability, but the men (normally under 21 year olds) who worked for us seemed very keen to get off the shopfloor, and into the back, where there was music playing, the ability to chat comfortably while you worked, swearing was permitted a bit more freely. The split was maybe 70/30 men to women at that time. The men seemed to stay in the role unless they wanted to progress into management, whereas there was more movement between warehouse and shopfloor for women.
The hours were also more suited to those without caring roles, starting at 6/7am.

I was surprised by this too. It is harder to recruit warehouse staff so it seems reasonable that they are paid more. Warehouses are also different locations than shops and the job is not the same (I don’t know if it’s harder or easier but it is definitely different). I think it’s a worrying outcome.

Love the arrogance of people who think they can assess just anything from their layperson's perspective! The confidence to assume you understand the situation better than the staff involved, their legal team and most importantly the judge!

You really don't know much about equal pay laws @GreenTeaLikesMe

Are the warehouse staff and shop floor staff in the same building? That makes a difference imo. I imagined tgevwarehousevstaffvwete working in out of town locations in the main depots.

OMG have you heard yourself? The market will sort everything, will it?! No it won't. And women footballers should be paid more, the games are more exciting as they show their skills off better than male footballers!

Equal pay and disclosures have been required for years. This makes zero difference to paying women less than men for the same job. I have a highly capable woman in my team who earns more than £7k less than a man who is less capable than her and the recruiting manager knows it and knew it when shecrecruited them. It's fundamentally wrong.

This is the right decision by the court. I applaud it as a woman and as an advocate of equal rights.

So glad we have a government in that advocates workers rights too.

I will never understand the argument that physical work justifies a higher rate of pay. Many of the jobs typically done by women are mentally and emotionally demanding yet somehow in discussions around equitable pay that is ignored or seen as not as worthy.

Pay equity is important. We need a way to address the fact that jobs typically done by women have been paid significantly less for generations. It has never been fair and should be challenged.

Yes, I'm pretty confident that an employer will pay as little as they can get away with, to any employee, wherever they work in the organisation. Happens all the time, in every industry. They clearly had a strong case for sex discrimination in this, so good on them. Maybe other employers will take note and change their hiring practices (habloodyha).

I don’t think it’s necessarily quite as clear cut as ‘working on the till’ and ‘humping stuff about in a warehouse’.

I didn’t work for next, but another high street fashion retailer. But there was days when I didn’t even touch a till, never mind get to stand behind it.

Our deliveries had to be collected from our service yard and taken to the stockroom by the same staff as operated the tills (some large stores had specific teams for this, but not most smaller ones). They weren’t carrying the same volume of stock, but the stock that we were wasn’t lighter for us.
Any item missing from a delivery, would show up on our stock loss (because it was just assumed that the error was in store). So it had to be checked off in-store, (time consuming and annoying, not necessarily mentally taxing. But I’d argue no less mentally taxing than counting the right number of items in the warehouse to begin with). The responsibility of filing the paperwork (to prevent a financial loss) was entirely down to the in-store team. (Not a physical job, but vital to the business economics).
Those deliveries once processed/hung/tagged etc need to be put out onto the shop floor (again, some stores will have set teams for this/out of hours staff but not the smaller ones). Running a 300+ item delivery downstairs is physically demanding.

Then there’s the moving stock from the upstairs to downstairs, and round the store (replen, moving the stock round the floor etc) That can be heavy and physically demanding. (We couldn’t just carry a couple of pairs of jeans at a time, we needed to bring 10/15/20 in our arms at once. An entire shift can be spent running around on ‘replen’.

Then there’s changing the graphics/light boxes/ displays etc. Depending on what’s in your store this can be incredibly physically demanding (again some stores will have designated teams for this kind of thing, but lots won’t).

And there’s the ‘risk’ that comes from dealing with the public (different to carrying heavy stock all day, but still a risk). There was the man who leaned over the till and told me to “watch what happens” if I didn’t give him exactly what he wanted. The man who in a fit of rage (we never found out why) punched a mannequin over that literally bounced off the floor next to a manner of staff. There was the guy who pushed a huge metal fixture at me (I was pregnant at the time, although he had no way of knowing that), so he could steal an arm full of expensive jackets from where I happened to be stood.

There’s the responsibility of ensuring the store is clear of customers every time there’s a fire alarm. There’s the cleaning up vomit, children’s and a drunk woman who got too ‘merry’ on black eye Friday. We found more soiled underwear in our changing rooms than I could ever have imagined.

I’m not disputing that the warehouse staff deserve their pay. But it’s disingenuous to pretend that a lot of these shop staff are just standing behind a till. I work for the prison service now, and honestly I’m treated better. At least people acknowledge that what I do is rubbish now.

Maybe make models should be paid the same as female models!? I agree equal pay for equal work but discrimination laws now appear to be looking at different types of work and making comparisons with a rule based system which may simply be at odds with the way salaries are determined in a non communist state.

If you bring something extra to a job e.g. strength why should an employer not pay more within reason?

The pay disparity may be due to simply supply and demand with few willing to do physically demanding warehouse work for long and therefore salaries have to be higher to attract staff not some covert means to suppress women s pay. If this was the case, the company would have been easily able to justify the discrepancy and the ruling would have been different.

Honestly, do people not understand how tribunals work? It's been a six year case.

There seems to be a lack of understanding about what Equal
Pay is in legal terms.

Equal Pay is about being paid the same for work if equal value.

Analytical Job Evaluation Schemes allow employers to assess each job (not person) and give it a score. Jobs that score the same or similar e.g. 10-15 or 15-20 etc. are jobs of equal value. Employees in those jobs should be paid the same or similar unless an employer can demonstrate to an ET an objective justification.

The Next employees proved to a ET that the warehouse and sales consultant jobs were of equal value.

Are you sure physical strength is "something extra", or is it a fundamental requirement of the warehouse job? Can you not envisage the "something extra" required of the shop floor staff, for instance the ability to deal patiently with aggravating customers and think on their feet?

Many of the warehouse guys would be absolutely terrible at the shop-floor job - and vice versa, no doubt.

Which is why the law says equal pay for work of equal value, not identical work. That is what the Dagenham machinists went on strike for. The court is obviously better informed than you of the law and how to assess equal value.

Another post demonstrating a lack of understanding of how tribunals work and how the law in this area works.

If male models have legal grounds to bring a case then good luck to them.

The point you make about strength is the sort of argument being made back in the 60s.

There’s already been massive cases like this in Scotland where the local authorities have been battered for paying highly male populated jobs (eg binmen) more than eg clerical staff.

Pay can’t just be decided on physicality - there was acknowledgement that the overall skills and responsibility levels were similar.

Eg even if salespeople did just do till work, they’re one customer away from going viral and doing reputational damage if they provide anything less than perfect service to the wrong person.

My daughter worked in hospitality. Did 15000 steps in a shift. Dealing with drunk customers in a sporting venue and humping heavy stuff around multiple bars and corporate boxes in a stadium. All women in that job.

All the male staff were either managers or worked in the cellar. Music on. Sitting on stools waiting for an alert to send up stock in a cage. The stock was then picked up and moved on to trolleys by the women and moved to the bars.

All young people who were hired by the male manager. He set the pay. £13 hr for the cellar people and £11.50 for the bar staff. My daughter challenged it and asked to work in the cellar instead. He said she wouldn’t like it!

Which is why the law says equal pay for work of equal value, not identical work. That is what the Dagenham machinists went on strike for. The court is obviously better informed than you of the law and how to assess equal value.

Exactly!

This.
I have not shopped in Next since the CEO voted in the house of Lords to cut the amount of childcare support people claiming Tax Credits received - ie he his low paid employees.
Pricey and poorer quality than it used to be.

What are you worrying about?

Have you never heard of the 1968 Dagenham strike, where the sewing machinists constructing the car seats - women - were paid 15% less than those putting car parts together - men? Which led to the law which says, work of equal value should be paid equally?

What are you worried is going to happen, as a result of a court deciding that two jobs are of equal value? The sky didn't fall in in 1968, it's not going to in 2024 either...

DH used to do warehouse work, not for Next but another high street retailer. The warehouse shifts were 6am-3pm, 3pm-12 midnight or 9pm-6am, 7 days a week with an exception of there being no 3pm-12 midnight shift on a Sunday. Let's say the Next warehouse staff are the same. I would find it highly unlikely that there are store staff working the same unsociable hours (with the exception of any airport stores and during the Next sale when stores open ridiculously early). Warehouse staff get a premium due to the unsociable hours. With this ruling there wouldn't be a premium now (unless Next are going to rewrite everyone's contracts), this sounds absolutely crazy.