The Employment Appeal Tribunal handed down a split ruling on September 7 in Next Retail Ltd and Next Distribution Ltd v Miss M Thandi and others, a case covering 3,540 retail sales consultants who argued their pay should match that of the company’s warehouse operatives under equal pay law. Mr Justice Bourne found that the original Leeds Employment Tribunal had erred in how it assessed whether Next had a legitimate business aim for paying the two roles differently, a point that goes back for reconsideration. But the EAT upheld the tribunal’s finding that the claimants, predominantly women in retail roles compared against a predominantly male warehouse workforce, had established particular disadvantage, and it dismissed their cross-appeal on direct discrimination.
Why it matters: this is not the clean employer win some early coverage suggested. Next avoided an outright loss on the legitimate aim question, but the case is not over, it returns to a tribunal for that question to be re-assessed, while the core finding of disadvantage stands. Retailers with comparable pay gaps between predominantly female customer-facing roles and predominantly male warehouse or logistics roles should read this as active legal exposure, not a closed file.
The original insight here is procedural: equal value claims that compare genuinely different job families, shop floor versus warehouse, are proving far harder for either side to win outright than claims comparing similar roles. Employers cannot count on a legitimate aim defense holding up automatically, and claimants cannot count on a disadvantage finding alone forcing a settlement. Both sides now face years of further litigation on remand before the pay question itself is resolved. It lands alongside the UK’s latest minimum wage naming round and rising legal exposure around pay and workforce equity programs generally, both signs that pay-related compliance risk is climbing across UK and US employers at once.
