Asda is in trouble in regards to equal pay rights and may have to pay out large amounts of money in back pay to 400 female staff who are claiming they are paid unequally.
Many of the staff who is claiming against their employer are female shelf workers, and are claiming for six years worth of pay that they say is unequal to the people who work jobs of a similar importance in the warehouses, but get paid more.
The large scale concern is that if the employees win, then this could have consequences for the other superstore chains like Morrisons, Tesco and Sainsburys, and leave them vulnerable to claims from their own staff members. The lawyer representing Asda’s disillusioned work force said that “the implications for any supermarket are enormous.”
He added that “we are very confident the jobs are pretty much the same. In the warehouses they take stuff off shelves and put them on lorries. In the supermarket, they take pallets off the lorry and put the stuff on shelves.”
Equal pay cases are far more common in the public sector, and so this case is significant in the fact that it is a private company being claimed against by such a large number of its employees.
A spokesman for Asda commented that they “pay a fair market rate regardless of gender.”
