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.

Perhaps they’d recruit more women if they actually targeted that demographic and made it a safe environment

I doubt this decision will make business unworkable for Next . They make huge profits and will continue to do so.

All that has changed is that some low wage women will see a small increase in their take home pay.

Wages are probably the biggest cost for a large business. It’s not in their interests to take care of their workers so sometimes a decision higher up has to be made in order to protect workers.

But it’s harder to recruit warehouse workers

The worldwide equal pay laws aren't based on supply and demand, are they? And recruitment isn't based on pay alone. Make the job more attractive, you'll recruit. One idea; less than school hours. So many parents need that, you'd clean up.

Many years ago I worked in the wages department of a huge company and had access to the charts showing the wages for the various grades. There were two columns - male and female with the female salaries being lower. I sat next to a man who was doing the same job as I was and he was paid more.

Came on to say exactly this! Job evaluation schemes are what these equal pay decisions are usually based on. So job a) can be physically demanding, and job b) can be customer service focused. Completely different skills sets but the same level of skill is needed for both, so they are evaluated at the same level and should be paid at the same level.

One of the reasons job evaluation is used is because historically jobs using a stereotypical male skills set (such as physical strength) were valued (and paid!) higher than jobs jobs using stereotypical female skills sets, such as caring roles, customer services roles etc.

seems totally ridiculous / sounds commie
Next should change their contracts and put ppl into bands where the staff can be moved between tills and warehouse to suit the needs of the business.

sounds commie

WTAF?

I have been in some job evaluation work for a local authority.

The kinds of things that push a job up are financial responsibilities, emotional stress, dirty work, physical risks. I can easily see shop work and warehouse work coming out roughly equal but for different reasons.

Given that half the staff in the warehouse were female, it's not about paying males more.
It's paying more for the job that no one really wants to do. Let's be honest. Same with the binmen and clerical staff argument.

Exactly this.

What gets loaded onto a pallet or into a cage in a warehouse or distribution centre is then off loaded on the shop floor.

In my experience of supermarket, recruitment to WH or store was identical. At the point where you were called forward to attend a recruitment interview you didn't know what type of job you might be offered. Women were almost never offered warehouse jobs.

The discrimination doesn't end with basic pay. Supermarket store workers frequently don't get offered full time jobs. Short shifts, frequently changed. No overtime. No extra pay for unsociable hours working. Unpaid breaks.

Next were not allowed to claim market forces as a defence because that is the same as saying 'everybody else was discriminating, we just joined in'.

Store work is badly paid normally on or close to NMW. Many store workers are receiving benefits to supplement their income. Effectively we are all subsidising the wage bills of big businesses.

Sigourney Weaver only got paid $35,000 for her starring role in Alien. Yet she was the sole survivor of the Nostromo and single-handedly fought off an 8ft Alien before blasting it out of the hatch into deep space with a grappling hook gun. That's after shifting a lot of crates around the loading bay with one of those automated JCB type things. Meanwhile, Tom Skerritt loses his head before he even flares up a flamethrower and John Hurt chokes on his porridge in the ship's canteen. Equal pay for men and women and bonuses for every alien eliminated.

Yet another thread arguing against the law and willfully? misunderstanding the physicality of retail work.

A lot of the heavy lifting in warehouses is done by machines. People aren't lifting crates onto racking 12 feet off the ground by hand FFS.

Warehouse staff don't take the articles out of the shop storeroom and fill the racks with them either. They probably also don't have to start work at 4 am on Boxing Day for the Next sale either.

It's been proven in several cases that work is of equal value. There's already a precedent at Asda that shop floor and warehouse work is of equal value and deserves equal pay. I despair how many threads there's been devaluing mostly female work on this subject.

Retail is hard to recruit too. Because that's also a shitty physically demanding job. On your feet all day, dealing with rude and dishonest members of the public, taking heavy boxes from wherever the delivery driver leaves them and putting them on display. Endlessly picking them up after customers have left them on the floor.

I had a friend who worked for Next some years ago. Everyone had to work the Boxing Day sale and they spent the day dealing with people fighting over stock, pulling it from the racks and dragging it into corners to sort through, discarding anything they weren't interested in so it all had to be rehung, all at the same time as dealing with all the people demanding 'this' in another size/colour (if it's not out, they don't have it, it's the sale) and arguing with people wanting refunds on all their Christmas gifts either because they don't want them or the item is now in the sale at half price (they don't do refunds on BD because they're too busy with the sale).

I used to work for monsoon when I was at university . Not only did I have to hump boxes around and drag them up and down flights of stairs ( no lift) but they also forced you to buy their new clothes and accessories every season change with your own wages!!
I also did window dressing, stock rotation, inventory, the till. Shop work is quite demanding and low paid.

Em… yes we do.
New York Times
and good on them!

A long time ago, when I worked retail, my job was mostly to stand around, to chat with customers, and to check them out at the till. One summer I worked a job where my only task was to change the price tags every morning and then wander the store the rest of my shift in case a customer had a question. someone else, I don’t know who because we never saw them when the store was open, was hired to lift boxes and stock shelves. Someone else moved shelving around.

today I see retail workers running around trying to help customers at the til in between unloading delivery trucks themselves. Boxes of stock pile up because they don’t have time to open them. Short-staffing has changed the nature of retail work and the pay needs to change with it.

In my experience of supermarket, recruitment to WH or store was identical. At the point where you were called forward to attend a recruitment interview you didn't know what type of job you might be offered. Women were almost never^ offered warehouse jobs.

The discrimination doesn't end with basic pay. Supermarket store workers frequently don't get offered full time jobs. Short shifts, frequently changed. No overtime. No extra pay for unsociable hours working. Unpaid breaks^

This is key and was the same at Asda. People applied to work for the company and there was quite a lot of 'you're a woman, you'll work in the shop' putting boxes of beans on shelves and scanning them through the tills (it would be interesting to work out how much weight a till operator lifts during a shift, from a seated position which makes it more difficult/stressful on the back) vs 'you're a man you can work in the warehouse lifting the same boxes of beans into cages or onto pallets for more money and better pay/shift patterns'.

Haven't worked in retail myself but know several people who have and do and it's hard physical work. On your feet all day moving stock about, rearranging displays, dealing with miserable rude customers who dump items everywhere, they deserve every penny afaic.

In Leicester (their HQ) the new shop, warehouse and call centre workers all work across call centre/shop/warehouse. Which is probably why the court ruled against them

I am saddened (though not shocked) to see so many posts, on a site mainly for women, decrying what should be celebrated as a great victory for female workers.

Too many people see women's jobs as lesser to men's jobs. As though women are only working for 'pin money' and to get them out of the house.

Discrimination is now more subtle than it was in the past but it is still going on.

I read that the average settlement is likely to be around £6,000. Across 3,500 workers that's £21m. In the last year Next made £918m profit. They can afford to pay their staff according to the law.

It's really bloody hard to win this kind of equal pay award against a behemoth like Next. It's obviously well deserved and much overdue.

Jobs shouldn't attract a penis premium.

There is nothing novel or surprising about this ET judgment. Next just put off dealing with it to defer the cash flow implications. £30m isn't going to hurt Next when it's spread over a few years or more.

When I was a teen I worked at a department store warehouse for a few years and then moved to the shop. The shop was far harder. Awful customers, on your feet for a ten hour shift, I was never stood behind a till. The definitely was physical work too, I was moving cots and prams, taking car seats to fit at cars. I got paid the same at both though.

The patriarchy will continue to thrive as long as it has people like @GreenTeaLikesMe to prop it up.

One step forward, two steps back.

I think this will be the end of Next. I feel like they've been struggling for a while and the payouts they will have to make will ruin them.

Yes, pay is always dependent on how much heavy stuff you lift, that’s why removers earn so much more than accountants, who only have to lift a little laptop…

This isn’t new. There was a similar action many years ago where dinner ladies successfully got their pay raised as their work was seen as compatible with refuse collectors, who earned much more.