Thousands of female shop workers at Next have won a six-year legal battle over equal pay in a landmark decision which could cost the retailer more than £30m.
An employment tribunal has ruled that Next should have paid its store staff, who are mostly women, the same hourly rates as its mostly male warehouse workers.
More than 3,500 current and former shop workers will now be entitled to compensation going back to when the claim was first lodged in 2018. Lawyers representing the staff estimate that Next could end up footing a bill of more than £30m.
The ruling is likely to spook rival retail bosses as it marks the first claim of this type against a national retailer to secure a win. Lawyers in this case are also representing more than 112,000 store staff across Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Co-op in similar claims.
However, Next is planning to appeal the ruling.
A spokesman said: “This is the first equal pay group action in the private sector to reach a decision at tribunal level and raises a number of important points of legal principle.”
Just over half of Next’s warehouse workers are men, while over 77pc of shop staff are women. The retailer argued that it was paying market rates to both groups.
The tribunal found that there was “no conscious or subconscious influence of gender which affected the basic rates of pay”.
Instead, it said the “drive and imperative was to reduce cost and enhance profit”.
It ruled that the “business need was not sufficiently great as to overcome the discriminatory effect of lower basic pay”.
Under equal pay law, work of equal value must be paid equally unless an employer can prove that the salary difference is due to a reason that is not sex discrimination.
Helen Scarsbrook, who has worked for Next for more than 20 years, said: “Anyone who works in retail knows that it is a physically and emotionally tough job”.
A leading claimant in the case, the 68-year-old celebrated on Tuesday and told the BBC her compensation, likely to amount to several thousand pounds, would let her pay off her car loan, take a “very nice” holiday or perhaps retire.
She said: “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.”
Elizabeth George, a partner and barrister at Leigh Day, which represented the claimants, said: “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.’”