The young will pay for equal pay
Tesco was my first job. For years I made a living shopping for other people, rattling a steel trolley through a fluorescent republic of tea bags, cereal and bin liners – think Supermarket Sweep, minus the part where you get to keep anything. The retail giant employs more people than the entire British Army: regulars, reservists and Gurkhas combined. For a teenager with no CV and even fewer options, it's one of the last reliable doors into the workforce. And it props that door open while running on pennies of profit.
But not all diamonds last forever. An employment tribunal in Reading is now deciding whether to award up to six years of back pay to roughly 60,000 Tesco store workers. Shop floor roles such as stacking shelves, working checkouts and serving customers are done overwhelmingly by women, while the warehouse jobs they've been rated equal to – paying up to £5.50 an hour more – are done overwhelmingly by men. Under the Equality Act, that gap between work of supposedly equal value becomes potential sex discrimination, and Tesco a potential defendant. Quite how a checkout and a forklift ended up rated identically isn't obvious to anyone who's actually done either job. The bill could reach £4 billion at Tesco alone – and if similar claims succeed across the other big supermarkets, make it £8 billion.
Retail has already endured a brutal couple of years. Employer National Insurance rises and a climbing minimum wage cost the sector £5 billion in 2025, adding more than 13 per cent to the cost of employing a part-time worker. Finance chiefs have told us what comes next: more than half plan to cut staff hours, a third are freezing recruitment outright, and plenty more won't bother replacing a role at all – because self-checkouts, unlike teenagers, don't trigger National Insurance payments. You can see it on the high street already, burying what little remained of the Saturday job.
The law could reward the exact opposite of what it intends. A shop worker can claim a warehouse worker's wage for one reason only: both are on Tesco's payroll. When the case reached the European Court in 2021, the judges allowed the comparison because Tesco was the "single source" paying both. Break that link and the claim dies, and breaking it is easy: the warehouses can go to an outside contractor like GXO or DHL, with no shared payroll left to compare. For now the grocers outsource to save money; a four-billion-pound bill gives them a far better reason. Warehouse work slides toward agencies and contractors, easier to hire and drop than the staff jobs it replaces.
There's still time to turn back. Last year New Zealand faced a similar wave of equal pay claims and chose a different path. It passed emergency legislation that sharply narrowed the definition of "female-dominated work". Claims vanished overnight, and the government wrote NZ$12.9 billion of savings straight into the budget.
Labour is heading the other way entirely. In March, ministers confirmed mandatory ethnicity and disability pay-gap reporting for large employers, along with a new right to bring equal pay claims on those grounds. Even the government's own watchdog isn't convinced. It expects a net loss to the economy, warns that the policy is likelier to close gaps by levelling everyone down than by paying anyone more, and notes that employers may simply hire fewer disabled and ethnic minority workers to keep their figures looking clean. Some equality.
Britain needs to borrow the Kiwi instinct, and quickly. Halt the planned extension of these claims to race and disability, before the same mistake repeats on a larger scale. And strike "equal value" from the Equality Act altogether. Keep equal pay for people doing the same job, but stop pretending a panel can declare a forklift driver and a checkout assistant interchangeable and then bill the difference to discrimination.
What the Tesco judgement really decides is whether economic reality still gets a vote in Britain. Retailers could try to pass the cost on to customers, but with grocery volumes below pre-pandemic levels and shoppers already trading down, there's little room left to squeeze. So the bill will land instead on suppliers, on store formats, and on the jobs the next generation badly needs. The road to equality, it turns out, can be paved with hiring freezes.
Martha Evans