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.

The thing is, is that the ET can say the work is of 'equal value' but yet it's harder to recruit for warehouse than retail. Why is that?

I just wonder when this will end. We now effectively have the courts telling businesses that it's tough shit they cannot pay more to recruit a more 'in demand' worker. Market rates dictate what companies offer to recruit employees.

So if Amazon pay their workers £X per hour wouldn't Next need to be close to that to get staff? This isn't an argument for me based on women vs men (although that's the line they've gone down) this is about market rate for a job.

@banjaxxed The issue was that women were being denied the opportunity to get better paid jobs. At the point when the case started the split male/female was around 77/23 in warehouses.

Since the case started they are now more like 50/50. Funny how they have managed that!

Next are not being told they have to pay warehouse workers less, they are being told they should have paid the shop workers the same. Given that at the time the case started a significant majority of warehouse workers were male.

If you have a discriminatory recruitment process which funnels majority men into a better paying job and women into an equivalent but worse paying job, the ET is going to rule against you.

@GnomeDePlume I’d be astonished if Next funnelled applicants - they will have applied via a website stating their preferences for locations and work - they will have applied for warehouses or shops.

@HermioneWeasley Next I don't know so well but I do know the process for our local national supermarket where the funnelling process was most definitely taking place.

Within Next the warehouse staffing has gone from around 77/23 m/f to roughly 50/50 in the space of 5 years something has changed.

This case and the supermarket cases to follow have forced the employers to clean up their act. The discrimination was so structural and blatant it was almost invisible.

Remember that this case and the others started in 2019. While the employers have dragged their heels through the court process they have at the same time closed the gap. Some of this will be due to the steady increase in NMW and some will be due to the detail revealed by these cases.

The payouts Next employees are getting average at £6k. This isn't a lottery win it is backpay for the years of discrimination.