More than 50 years have passed since a strike of the women who sewn the covers of the seats at the Ford car plant in Dagenham caused the approval of the United Kingdom’s equal payment law, and employers are finally beginning to see how far the legislation could be.
A series of recent judicial decisions against large retailers who have traditionally paid to warehouse workers more than predominantly personal of the women’s store could leave the companies responsible for payments that reach billions.
Asda looks more exposed, since a claim that involves more than 60,000 current and previous employees moves to its final stages. But Tesco, J Sainsbury, WM Morrison and CO-OP are fighting similar statements, and so far, the courts have greatly found in the favor of the store workers.
Lawyers say that there is the possibility that salary equality disputes intensify in other sectors, since women are increasingly willing to challenge their employers.
“In the last two years I have made more claims of salary equality than in the last decade,” said Jo Keddie, a partner of the Forsters law firm.
“Employers are alive. . . In a way, they were not before, ”said Stephen Ratcliffe, partner of the Baker McKenzie law firm, adding that the United Kingdom was now taking the initiative to enforce the concept of equal payment for work of equal value.
This concept, enshrined in the legislation of the 1970s, means that women can present claims not only when their employer pays them less than the men who do the same work or similar, but also when they are in a different role that is equally demanding in terms of effort, skill or responsibility.
Ford sewing machinists in Dagenham were campaigning to receive the same “qualified” salary qualification as men who do a comparable job in another part of the factory. Barbara Castle, then Minister of Employment, supported his cause and led through legislation.
However, for decades later, the concept of equal value was not proven largely, because presenting a claim is an expensive three -stage process that has been.
In the first stage, one court decides whether a work can be compared with another with the same employer. The second stage determines whether the roles have the same value, in a labyrinthine process in which independent experts fight for the details of work descriptions and obtain them by factors such as physical and emotional effort, skill or decision making.
In the third and final stage, the load load changes to the employer, who must demonstrate that they have an objective reason for differences in the salary that is not based on gender.
A wave of salary equality claims in the public sector began in the early 2000s after the councils carried out labor evaluations that showed the cooks, cleaners and care personnel were routinely paid less than workers in work dominated by men collecting containers and repair roads.
These statements were fed by the business efforts of a lawyer, Cross Stefanwho saw the potential to register thousands of workers from the Council and fight against their claims on a base without desire.
When Birmingham City Council reached an agreement To resolve their historical claims of salary equality, incur liabilities that helped boost it to bankruptcy, had to reserve sports halls and buses in ACAS conciliators to help workers sign their agreements, according to Employment Lawyer Darren Newman.
But bringing such long -term statements “only works because the numbers are huge,” he added. “You need very large groups of employees in standardized terms and conditions, with a really clear gender breakdown.”
The statements of salary equality have wreaked havoc on the finances of the local authorities, especially in the work councils that tended to maintain the services at home compared to the conservative advice that adopted subcontracting. In the retail sector, it means that groups with internal distribution are more exposed.
Next, the clothing chain could be the first major employer of the private sector to face a considerable compensation bill, after a Contentious corridor of stage 3 last year. The Employment Court discovered that although the retailer had not demonstrated “conscious or subconscious gender influence” when establishing the salary, he could not justify higher basic salary and overtime rates in the warehouses by arguing that he was simply paying the “current rate.”
The court said that the purpose of the legislation would defeat if the market forces could be used as a “triumph card” in this way, since it would allow indirectly discriminatory practices to be “legally sustained to perpetuity.”
Other statements against retailers are in an earlier stage, but the largest individual action, which involves more than 60,000 employees of the ASDA supermarket, reached a milestone last month when a court ruled that 12 of 14 roles based on stores that had examined were of equal value for those in the hands of the mainly masculine counterparts in the warehouses.
“We are … aware that other great retailers and their workers are observing us,” the judges said to establish their findings. Based on more than 11,000 pages of expert evidence, the trial dissected the demands of each role in thorough details, weighing the skill, knowledge and judgment required to turn pancakes, inject filling into donuts or maintain fresh fruit exhibitions.
The GMB union, which supports the claim of ASDA workers, said that the “predominantly feminine retail workforce is paid to £ 3.74 per hour less than the predominantly male workforce of the warehouse.”
Asda’s ruling was announced by activists as a sign of a cultural change, a long time ago, to recognize the real value of work typically done by women. “People have been waiting for a long time, a long time, many people will be happy with that result,” said Karen Morrell, a GMB activist.
Financial bets are high for employers, since the government prepares to extend salary rights to ethnic minority workers and disabled persons, already measure that the EU provides new requirements to inform and address payment gaps.
Leigh Day, a law firm that represents many of the claimants against ASDA and the other retailers, estimates that the total bill for the sector could exceed the £ 8 billion. Tesco’s possible financial exhibition is higher, says Leigh Day, although the number of claimants against ASDA is currently higher.
He estimates that the next one could have to pay up to £ 30 million in subsequent compensation and payment, and to match the terms for workers.
The Executive Director of Next has said that the chain can close some stores if it loses an appeal on last year’s decision. Lord Simon Wolfson insisted that this “was not a threat” or “destined to sound bad”, but it would simply be the consequence of an increase in operating costs, reaching other salary and fiscal increases and a long decrease in street sales.
Richard Lim, executive director of the Rebeil Economics consultant, said the decisions were a concern for an industry that had seen “excessive waves of interruptions and successive waves of growing costs.”
Baker McKenzie Ratcliffe said the “huge” equal pay Liabilities The local authorities had incurred shows why the current cases of the retail sector would be “litigated for many years at the highest level.”
But Paula Lee, a Leigh Day partner who represents store workers in her claim against Tesco, said the recent decisions had “sent a clear message from the trip of the trip” that should put other employers on maximum alert.
“If I were an employer, I would be thinking, Crikey, the tide is coming now,” he said, adding that salary equality problems could be assumptions in any sector where the roles were segregated by gender.
“Where there are high concentrations of women, you will find a low salary,” Lee said, pointing to human resources and IT departments as potential areas of concern for white collar employers.
One way for employers to advance to claims of equal payment is to carry out an audit of their workforce, Benchmarking roles to detect any discrepancy in payment and address them. But Keddie in Forsters said that companies that made salary equality audits “do not always like the results,” echoing another lawyer, who said that customers asked how to verify if they had a problem of equal wages without creating any trace of paper that could have to be disclosed later in the court.
“If you find a problem. . . You have to solve it as quickly as possible. There is no grace period, ”said Charles Cotton, main advisor to the CIPD organization for human resources professionals. “When you eventually look, it could be a lot of money.”