Supermarket staff in £15m equal pay claim
A ROW over equal pay could potentially see Sainsbury’s Huddersfield stores pay out up to £15m in back-payments to staff.
Solicitors are representing a group of workers at Huddersfield’s big five supermarkets who have joined a legal fight for equal pay which could award each of them up to £10,000 in back pay.
The 138 staff work across 17 stores at Asda, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Morrisons and the Co-op throughout the Huddersfield area.
The lawyers say that if all the eligible staff at Sainsbury’s Huddersfield stores alone were to join the claim for equal pay, the supermarket could have to pay up to £15 million to staff if they are found to have been wrongly underpaid.
Hundreds more supermarket workers across Huddersfield are likely to be eligible to join the claim which is on behalf of hourly-paid, store-based staff, mainly women, who claim their work is of equal value to that of workers, mainly men, who work in the supermarkets’ distribution centres.
The difference in hourly pay for a shop floor worker and a distribution centre worker at the big five supermarkets can range from £1.50 to £3. Lawyers believe the average worker could be entitled to £10,000 in back pay up to six years.
Leigh Day is handling claims for more than 45,000 supermarket workers nationally. It successfully brought an equal pay claims case against Birmingham City Council in 2012, which resulted in a landmark ruling by the Supreme Court.
In the ruling in October 2012, Leigh Day won the right for equal pay claims to be brought in the High Court up to six years after a worker leaves the employment where pay discrimination may have occurred.
The Supreme Court judgment clarified the law on this point and effectively extended the time limit for equal pay claims from six months to six years. This had huge implications for hundreds of thousands of workers.
Chris Benson, who leads the equal pay team at Leigh Day, said: “Supermarket workers have been buoyed by the success of the claims by council workers. It has given them the confidence to make similar claims.
“These claims relate to work done in stores compared to work done in the supermarket distribution centres.
“Despite equal pay laws being in place for almost 50 years, our clients believe they are still unlawfully underpaid.
“Our clients believe that store and distribution jobs are equally important to the big five supermarkets and should be paid equally. This case is not about whether the jobs are identical or even the same; it is saying they are of equal value.”
All five supermarkets have been contacted by the Examiner.
A Tesco spokeswoman said “We work hard to ensure that we reward our colleagues fairly for the jobs they do.
“The pay in our stores and in our distribution centres is the same for colleagues doing the same jobs regardless of gender.
“There are fundamental differences between the jobs in our stores versus those in distribution centres. These differences, in skills and demands, as well as the different markets in which they operate, do lead to variations in rates of pay between stores and distribution centres - but these are not in any way related to gender, and we will strongly defend these claims.”
A Co-op spokesman said: “We have received a small number of equal pay claims. Unlike some of the bigger food retailers, we do not have large scale multiple claims. It wouldn’t be appropriate to comment on individual claims, but we will be defending these claims and are confident that our reward practices are fair.”