UK court dismisses market forces, rules 'equal pay for jobs of equal value'
After 14 years of ostensibly right-wing government in the UK, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has taken power amid promises to avoid being ideologically driven, in a conscious attempt to divorce itself from any residue of its socialist legacy. But who needs general elections when the courts are there to enforce adherence to socialist ideals in the economy, potentially forcing stores to close and resulting in thousands or even tens of thousands of lost jobs?
If market forces don't determine value, what does?
In what is being called a “landmark” case, a UK employment tribunal has ruled that the retail chain Next should be paying its in-store staff the same hourly salary as its warehouse workers. The ruling is based on the tribunal’s decision that warehouse work is “of equal value” to that done by in-store workers, despite lawyers on behalf of Next arguing that they were paying the market rate for all their staff.
Most of Next’s in-store staff are women; most of the warehouse workers are men. While lawyers representing the claimants insisted that the lower pay for in-store staff was due to their being female, the tribunal ruled that Next’s salary decisions were not rooted in gender discrimination:
[There was] no conscious or subconscious influence of gender which affected the basic rates of pay...
Nonetheless, even after the ruling, one (female) lawyer representing the retail staff continued to claim that Next was taking advantage of its female employees:
When you have female-dominated jobs being paid less than male-dominated jobs and the work is equal, employers cannot pay women less simply by pointing to the market and saying, “It is the going rate for the jobs.”
Business needs relegated to second place
In a seeming contradiction, the tribuna appeared to concur with the opinion of the claimants' attorney in its dismissal of Next’s argument that market forces were a sufficient reason to pay some employees more and others less. Despite dismissing the idea that Next was discriminating based on gender, they concluded that discriminating based on basic market forces of supply and demand was also unacceptable:
[Next’s] drive and imperative was to reduce cost and enhance profit ... [however,] the business need was not sufficiently great as to overcome the discriminatory effect of lower basic pay.
The Telegraph quoted one retail worker who “celebrated” the ruling, saying,
Anyone who works in retail knows that it is a physically and emotionally tough job. But you become so used to having your work undervalued that you can easily start to doubt it yourself. I am so grateful to the judges for seeing our jobs for what they really are – equal.
Higher salaries, fewer jobs?
Next plans to appeal the ruling, pointing out that when market forces are forced out of the equation, job losses are likely to result. A spokesman told media sources last week that,
Inevitably some of our stores will no longer be viable if this ruling is upheld on appeal.
Not only would some stores likely close, he added, but it would become more difficult to attract new warehouse workers with higher wages, as wages would now have to rise for in-store workers simultaneously, making the move much more expensive for the retail chain:
If, for many people, warehouse work is less attractive than work in stores (as the evidence before the tribunal showed), how can a warehouse attract the number of employees it needs?
Lawyers plan to enforce 'equality' in all sectors
The cost to Next of the ruling, if it is upheld on appeal, is estimated to be in the region of £30 million. While Next could theoretically absorb the cost without great difficulty, Lord Wolfson, the company’s CEO, predicted that the ramifications of the tribunal’s ruling would be more severe in other business sectors where similar cases are pending. Lawyers for Next’s retail staff are also representing over 112,000 in-store staff in supermarkets such as Asda, Morrison’s, and Tesco.
