EQUAL PAY CLAIMS

DM Legal represented 40 home support workers that had refused their settlement offer in 2018 and we got them a better settlement offer. 

Alison Martin from DM Legal currently represents over 150 council workers in the Employment Tribunal. She has gained the legal knowledge and experience necessary to help our clients with the complicated matters which are equal pay cases. In countless successful cases Alison has proven that she is a true professional in this field of equality law.  Contact Alison Martin if you have any equal pay questions 01698308986.

Donna from DM Legal has taken on legal cases against Glasgow City Council. These are transfer clients who were unhappy with their previous legal representation via the incompetent trade unions.

Equal pay is for both male and female.

If a person’s pay and conditions are worse than someone’s else’s of the opposite sex doing the same or similar work, or work of equal value, for the same employer, this will potentially give rise to an equal pay claim.

By law, an employer should not pay different wages for the same or similar job, unless the reason for doing this has nothing to do with someone’s sex. 

People doing the same or similar job should get the same or equal pay, regardless of gender.

The basics of equal pay law is that employees should receive equal pay for equal work. This is achieved by the law inserting a “sex equality clause” into all employment contracts to replace an employee’s less favourable term(s) with the equivalent more favourable term.

For almost the last decade, Britain’s biggest supermarkets have been defending legal actions from their employees over equal pay. These claims are based upon the notion that the shop floor staff (who are mostly women) should be paid the same as employees who work in distribution centres (who are mostly men). 

Tesco among others are all facing claims that their failure to pay these roles equally amounts to sexual discrimination.

Decisions of successive courts indicate that the supermarkets’ defence lacks legal merit. Asda and Tesco have lost in the UK Supreme Court and European Court of Justice respectively on the issue of whether shop floor workers can compare themselves to distribution centre workers. As a result of these judgments the other supermarket withdrew their defences.

These claims are not new Morrisons and Sainsbury's also face new cases. In the 1980s, Sainsbury’s faced the same allegations – that it was failing to pay its employees in shop floor jobs equally to those in distribution centre roles. It lost that case, which may suggest the likely direction of this new wave of claims. 

The retail workers are arguing that their roles are of equal value and involve similar demands as roles in the distribution centres which are subject to higher rates of pay. The supermarkets have argued that these roles are in fact completely different and the roles in the distribution centres are much more physically demanding and thus attract higher remuneration. 

In order to succeed, the employees will now need to demonstrate to the Employment Tribunal that, comparing themselves to the warehouse staff, their work is in fact of equal value. Asda will still have the opportunity to defend the claim if they can show that the difference in pay is due to a material factor which is not of itself discriminatory. A further hearing will be arranged to decide these points. 

Equal pay is costly to get wrong, both in terms of legal claims and the negative publicity which can be significant.

Employers should review their pay rates across the organisation to ensure that they are complying with equal pay obligations, particularly where they have areas or roles predominantly staffed by women and others predominantly staffed by men. Employers should review their pay structures and consider their risk for claims based on the equal value of roles.