Asda loses equal pay claim battle

The Court of Appeal has upheld the ruling that Asda store staff can compare their roles with those in the supermarket giant’s distribution centres in legal claims over equal pay.

The Walmart owned Asda appealed the two previous rulings they lost, both of which found that lower paid shop workers, who are mostly women, can compare themselves to higher paid workers in Asda’s distribution centres, who are mostly men.

The workers, represented by law firm Leigh Day, argued that they should be paid equally to their colleagues in the supermarket’s distribution centres for their work of equal value.

Leigh Day represents over 30,000 shop floor staff from the big four supermarkets – Asda, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Morrisons – in similar equal pay cases which it believes will be “impacted” by this judgment.

The total estimate of the claims against the big four supermarkets, if they lose their cases, and are ordered to pay all eligible staff could be over £8bn, according to Leigh Day.

The Employment Tribunal first ruled against Asda in October 2016, Asda then appealed this decision on 10 different grounds. In August 2017 the Employment Appeal Tribunal ruled all points of their appeal unsuccessful. Asda then appealed the ruling to the Court of Appeal.

The case for Asda staff is the furthest along of all the supermarket equal pay claims and the judgments relating to the case will have implications for the other supermarket equal pay cases being brought by Leigh Day on behalf of tens of thousands of workers.

Linda Wong a lawyer from the employment team at Leigh Day who is working on behalf of supermarket workers in these equal pay claims, said: “Our clients are obviously delighted to have won this major victory against Asda and we now hope that rather than continuing to spend huge sums of money thwarting attempts to pay their staff what they are worth, Asda and the other major supermarkets pay their staff fairly as these workers are also their customers and fair wages benefit all businesses and UK society in general.

“We call on Walmart to lead the change for those hard-working store staff who are their workers and the public face of Asda.”

A spokesperson for Asda told Retail Sector: “We are obviously disappointed with the decision, which relates to a preliminary issue of whether jobs in different parts of the business can be compared. Asda brought this appeal because it involved complex legal issues which have never been fully tested in the private sector and we will continue to ensure this case is given the legal scrutiny it deserves.

“We remain confident in our case. This appeal has caused no delay to the main case, which has been continuing in the Employment Tribunal. The Tribunal has yet to consider whether the jobs are of equal value in terms of their demands; it is only if some jobs are of equal value that the tribunal will go on to consider the reasons for the pay differential between them, including the fact that there are different market rates in different industry sectors.

“At Asda, our hourly rates of pay in stores are the same for female and male colleagues and this is equally true in our depots.  Pay rates in stores differ from pay rates in distribution centres because the demands of the jobs in stores and the jobs in distribution centres are very different; they operate in different market sectors and we pay the market rate in those sectors regardless of gender.”

Asda also said it plans to apply to the Supreme Court directly to appeal the decision.