Our thanks to Steve for this on GB News. Plenty of female store workers will be made redundant if the employment tribunal’s insane ruling – that store workers should be paid the same as warehouse workers – isn’t quashed.
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Justice for Men & Boys 
This has happened in the public sector, in recent years Glasgow and then Birmingham have been big news. Of course councils can’t go bankrupt in reality, but the money comes from the taxpayer and basic services being reduced. Next hopefully will win on appeal but otherwise one can see it, and many other employers having to inflate market wages and reduce staff or go down. In Next’s case it’s particularly idiotic as 52 % of their warehouse staff are male and 30% of retail staff. They got caught by the fact they couldn’t show the difference wasn’t due to sex discrimination, not doubt because they hadn’t done some job evaluation process other than advertised for staff and recruited them.
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there was simialr case before brought by ambulance chaser law firm Leigh Day for asda warehouse vs supermarket claiming sex discrimination as warehouse staff were paid more than shop floor staff even though there were both male and female staff in both locations..
a rather silly approach to equality of pay but not equality of merit
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That is still trundling through the Courts. There are two key issues for employers a. the tribunals appear to begin with the presumption that if there is a disparity the onus is on the employer to prove it isn’t sex discrimination. And b. market forces in the rates of pay in terms of what other employers pay are not permitted. To deal with this, starting a couple of decades ago, councils I worked for undertook comprehensive “job evaluations” on all roles to head off point a. using these as evidence that “equivalent” roles had been measured against each other. And “outsourced” things such as homecare, parks and gardens etc. so that the pay rates of these roles were a matter for the contractors. Glasgow and Birmingham are examples of not doing the latter and therefore finding themselves with massive judgements against them because of the 1000s of workers directly employed by them. For those Councils who did outsource, even where “job evaluation” didn’t happen or appear “robust” the actual numbers of employees therefore the cumulative back pay was comparatively smaller. I suspect commercial firms have relied on a commercial understanding of the labour market and find themselves at a disadvantage facing such claims.
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