Equal Pay for different Job roles?

Caporegime
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I’d say keeping customers happy at the checkout isn’t easier, I’ve witnessed staff on the self checkouts take some awful abuse and are constantly on the move for 8 hours if they’re alone.

Not many places now actually make staff do any “heavy lifting” due to the number of back injuries and people milking sick pay.

At the end of the day people are paid what they’re willing to accept/negotiate. If you want to be paid more for physical labour then there are other roles than shelf stacking/warehouse work lifting some things that weigh a few kilos.
 
Soldato
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It doesn't matter - either way round you have someone doing a harder job for no more reward. Unless you are proposing that all roles in a supermarket are truly equal (in which case I shall mock you), the argument stands.

No, I don't consider that it matters. Pretty much every role has its upsides and its downsides. You might go home knackered after a shift in the warehouse, but you won't have been spat at or shouted at, you won't have had to mop up some drunk bloke's ****, or had to be polite to someone who is really patronising.

The hardest role is only the hardest when you focus on certain aspects of the job and ignore others. But there are certainly easier roles (or people who take the easiest route within their role).
 
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Soldato
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I find it interesting that people put so much emphasis on the difficulty of the job being the main factor in determining pay. I know that in my job and many, many others, difficulty ranks rather low down on the list of things that determines my wage.

Supply and demand for the role, how much income it generates, responsibility and budget play much more of a factor. I'd be willing to guess that the reason store roles have been paid less than warehouse roles is because there are far more of them and it wouldn't be cost effective to pay them more. It's the same reasons why customer service roles in most industries pay less than most other roles even though you could argue they are equally as difficult.

Plenty of people are paid unfairly compared to similar roles elsewhere, it just so happens that in this case there is a gender divide which can be used as a bargaining tool. Good luck to them I say!
 
Soldato
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No, I don't consider that it matters. Pretty much every role has its upsides and its downsides. You might go home knackered after a shift in the warehouse, but you won't have been spat at or shouted at, you won't have had to mop up some drunk bloke's ****, or had to be polite to someone who is really patronising.

The hardest role is only the hardest when you focus on certain aspects of the job and ignore others. But there are certainly easier roles (or people who take the easiest route within their role).
true, but that isn't a gievn that will happen.
Having worked full time in a supermarket in the past for around a year, I think I saw some be sick once.
As for abusive customers, again I rarely saw this (although I wasn't on checkout in fairness)

Whereas the "difficult" parts of the warehouse guy's job will definitely have to be carried out.
 
Soldato
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Plenty of people are paid unfairly compared to similar roles elsewhere, it just so happens that in this case there is a gender divide which can be used as a bargaining tool. Good luck to them I say!

Paid unfairly according to who and by what standard?

There is no gender divide in pay here. I haven't seen any evidence that woman are prevented from working in warehouses or that the reverse is true for men who want to work in retail
environments from the reporting on this law suit.

I would agree that people are perhaps placing too much emphasis on the physical processes(es) of the work involved.

Renumeration for a job involves a number of variables of which the physical processes of the job are but a minor consideration.

For example I have a family member who works half of his time on an oil rig and spends the rest of his time at home, in between helicopter commutes.

His job is in its basic mechanics is similiar to a school chef. Both provide bulk catering to a captive audience. Of course he inevitably gets paid a lot more then the average school chef because theres a far smaller pool of people willing to work in such circumstances.

I have worked in retail and in a warehouses and although certain mechanics of the job appear similiar the surrounding circumstances are anything but.

Witness the current retail Asda employment terms and conditions, which place quite an emphasis of 'flexible' working


'Greater flexibility' in work patterns for a retail food store means working more evenings, weekends and around lunch time during weekdays, all of which are somewhat more amenable to part time work and a family work life balance with supermarkets frequently located within walking distance of a suitable work force.

Conversely warehouses distributing groceries need to have a more consistent workforce (less capacity for part time work). With working hours at times often less amenable to family life. Warehouses are located more remotely then shops with more staff having to drive to them. Warehouses are not temperature controlled for the comfort of some of their occupants (unlike supermarkets), and are dirty and far more dangerous places to work then supermarkets.

I reject the fundamental notion that some judge and or bureaucrat can look at two different jobs and tell you what the respective 'worth' of each job is and what the renumeration should be for each job.

We have tried this approach in the past with socialism whereby burecarats have tried, remote from markets, to establish the comparative worth and importance of differnt jobs and goods. The results have consistently been a failure because no one person or even a group can accurately assess the almost limitless number of variables (some of which may not be immediately apparent) which determine what a market price for a good or service will be.

There is a simple rule to gauge what the salary for a job should be... A salary sufficient to hire and retain enough suitably qualified staff.

If a woman or a man wants the same wage as someone working in another job there's a simple means for then to seek to achieve this...

Namely obtain whatever qualifications and or experience are required for the job and apply for it like pretty much everyone else does.


Moderm feminist activism is little more then a shameless power grab and shakedown movement.

Equality used to be about meaning that any qualified and capable person shouldn't be discriminated against on seeking their own path on life.

Modern feminism seems to have tacitly accepted the biological reality that men and women, on average, are not equally capable in all regards and are not equally inclined to pursue the same path I life and so have now resorted to plain dishonest attempts to extort their way through life.

The knock on effects of a potentially sucessful claim in this case for the claimants would be huge and place a significant burden on the whole of the UK, ultimately negatively affecting the whole workforce including women. Businesses would have to jump through a burecratic nightmare of labyrinthian proportions to try and second guess any future claim of supposed discrimination by trying to assess the degree to which different roles withing their organisations might be deemed 'comparable' to others and hence what the 'correct' salary should be devoid of any actual consideration of what salary is needed to hire suitable staff.

The UK goverment would be well advised to put a stop to such legal uncertainty if they value the ability of uk companies to remain competitive.
 
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Soldato
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i would say completely different roles warehouse to shop floor.

your not going to get ******* by a forklift whilst packing sandras veg at the checkout.
 
Associate
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You can always swap roles if you wanna get paid more, oh wait they don't wanna, they want all the benefits but not the graft that goes with it. Nobody is stopping anyone from applying and doing other jobs and roles. The shouting of sexism is aids.

Seen the post about lidl and aldi, that all seems fair and the way forward, everyone pulling weight and helping out doing bits of everything. They should just go down this route instead of letting these cretins try to raise their wages by shouting sexism.
 
Associate
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You can always swap roles if you wanna get paid more, oh wait they don't wanna, they want all the benefits but not the graft that goes with it. Nobody is stopping anyone from applying and doing other jobs and roles. The shouting of sexism is aids.
I’d say keeping customers happy at the checkout isn’t easier, I’ve witnessed staff on the self checkouts take some awful abuse and are constantly on the move for 8 hours if they’re alone.

Not many places now actually make staff do any “heavy lifting” due to the number of back injuries and people milking sick pay.

At the end of the day people are paid what they’re willing to accept/negotiate. If you want to be paid more for physical labour then there are other roles than shelf stacking/warehouse work lifting some things that weigh a few kilos.

that's subjective. There isnt a brick wall stopping either sex from doing either role. Yes some people will find working with customers more difficult and vice versa. The reason there are less woman doing warehouse work is that they don't want to, they obviously find shopfloor work easier. To cry sexism is pathetic.
 
Caporegime
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Hopefully this will get laughed out of court, if it wasn't for the fact that there is such a surplus of workers due to flawed immigration policy people wouldn't be unhappy on minimum wage because companies would want to hold onto them and not just see them as expendable assets with an endless supply of candidates waiting in the wings to replace them. A lot of unfit people working in retail wouldn't be able to cope with the physical demands of warehouse work and wages are determined by the difficulty in filling the role more than anything. If they don't like retail pay and think warehouse work is comparable work then apply to warehouse jobs.
 
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Soldato
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Surely its just basic supply and demand?

Jobs that are dirty / hard physical work / boring will pay more than a job that are not to encourage people to do them.

If women happen to be less likely to take on roles such as those, and thus on average are paid less, then that's obviously fine?

I would expect a bin man (bin person?) to be paid more than a receptionist working at bin men HQ. Fair enough if a woman is working the bins, she should have course be paid the same as the men, but I don't think I've ever seen a female bin person down here.
 
Soldato
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Traditionally pay is linked to responsibility and the skills required for the job rather than how hard it is.

More skills required usually means harder to recruit workforce, and that of course is when the supply vs demand scale starts tipping in the workers favour.

What we seeing here on a claim of more pay based on how hard the job is a game changer for the employer/employee relationship in this country as we are a capitalist country.
 
Soldato
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I would expect a bin man (bin person?) to be paid more than a receptionist working at bin men HQ. Fair enough if a woman is working the bins, she should have course be paid the same as the men, but I don't think I've ever seen a female bin person down here.

Glasgow council lost a similar case and are having to sell off venues to cover the 548million it is costing them to cover the back pay to bring catering staff/care workers to the same pay as refuse collectors/grave diggers

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-47096596
 
Caporegime
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Glasgow council lost a similar case and are having to sell off venues to cover the 548million it is costing them to cover the back pay to bring catering staff/care workers to the same pay as refuse collectors/grave diggers

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-47096596

Seems like they even had issues with temporary schemes to compensated the people who were losing out on bonuses when they rejigged things because the main beneficiaries of those were men... which of course was the reason why they needed to realign things in the first place.

Likewise the extra payments for working longer than 37 hours a week are sexist too as the majority of women employed by the council work less??? Is overtime sexist now?

The extra ridiculous aspect of all this is that lots of these people were actually employed by a third party company anyway, yet it is the council/taxpayers coughing up the bill for all of this.

While I'm not a libertarian and do see the need for various employment laws, rights etc.. I think it is a bit ridiculous when it gets to this level - so long as there are equal opportunities available to both men and women for each role then the arguments about them supposedly being equivalent seem a bit silly. I doubt the supermarkets are overpaying warehouse staff for fun or because they feel like just giving extra profit away to men etc..
 
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