The Orwellian sound of Britain Equality Act 2010 It is strikingly Marxist: it demands equal pay for work of equal value, defined as:
A’s work is said to be equivalent to B’s work when it is similar to B’s work, is evaluated as being equivalent to B’s work, or has equivalent value to B’s work.
A task is similar to a task B when the tasks of A and B are identical or substantially similar and the differences between the two tasks are of no practical importance with respect to the working conditions.
… A’s job is rated as equivalent to B’s job if, in a job evaluation study, workers place equal value on A’s job and B’s job in terms of their demands on the worker.
…A’s work is neither the same nor evaluated as being equal to B’s work, but if it is equivalent to B’s work in terms of the factors required of A, such as effort, skill, and decision-making, it is considered to be of equal value to B’s work.
Simply put, supply and demand have been replaced by judges and labor commissions who have the power to decide which jobs are “equal” and therefore should be paid equally. And labor commissions do this based on vague and subjective considerations that do not change with changing circumstances. Imagine replacing “job” with “condiment” and having a judge decide whether ketchup and mustard should be priced equally because they are similar, broadly comparable, or considered equivalent in terms of the effort, skill, and decision-making that went into their production.
Do you think I’m joking? I’m not joking. Here’s an example of a case. I just decided in England.
More than 3,500 current and former Next workers have won the final stage of a six-year legal battle for equal pay.
The employment tribunal ruled that store workers, who are mostly women, cannot be paid less than warehouse workers, more than half of whom are men.
The court ruled that retail workers and warehouse workers were “equal” and should be paid equally. Then it responded that they paid everyone the market wage. Banned!
They then argued that warehouse workers’ wages were higher than retail workers’ wages in the overall labor market, which justified wage differences within companies.
However, the Employment Tribunal dismissed the claim as a legitimate claim for wage disparity.
According to the court’s ruling, from 2012 to 2023, 77.5% of Next’s retail consultants were women, while 52.75% of its warehouse operators were men.
The tribunal accepted that the pay gap between jobs was not due to “direct discrimination” involving “a conscious or subconscious influence of gender” on pay decisions, but rather to efforts “to reduce costs and increase profits”.
The court ruled that “there is not a business need sufficient to overcome the discriminatory effect of a lower base wage.”
No one is claiming that male and female warehouse workers are paid unequally, no one is claiming that male and female retail workers are paid unequally, and no one is claiming that there was direct or indirect discrimination. The only claim is that warehouse workers, who are less likely to be women than retail workers, make more money than retail workers. And because these jobs were deemed “equal,” the company violated. Equality Act 2010.
Who would have predicted that occupations as disparate as warehousing and retail would one day be considered “equal”?et now owes millions of dollars in unpaid wages to retail workers because Next failed to foresee such madness. Software engineers, especially those in AI, are in high demand right now. UK companies looking to hire them may be hesitant to raise their salaries for fear that a future ruling could classify software engineers as “equivalent” to larger, lower-paid groups like HR managers. Such a decision could easily send a company into bankruptcy.
Warehouse workers were nearly 50% female (47.25%). So women were not excluded from higher-paying jobs. The fact that 77.5% of retail workers were female suggests that retail is particularly attractive to women compared to men, and therefore there is a compensation gap. Any of the three female plaintiffs could have gotten a job in a warehouse. If the jobs were equal and the warehouse jobs paid more, this would be “perplexing,” according to the plaintiff’s theory. [Or, as Ayn Rand would say, blank out.]
actually, court case Next was struggling to fill warehouse positions and offered all of its retail employees, including the plaintiffs, the opportunity to transfer to warehouse work. Under cross-examination, one of the plaintiffs admitted that given the unpleasant environment of the warehouse, which the court described as “the whirring of machinery, the vibration, the alarm sirens, the squeaking of machines, wheels, rollers, constantly in every area,” the warehouse job “seemed less attractive” compared to the greater autonomy and more attractive environment of retail work. The plaintiff stated that “A lot more money.”
Thank goodness for the men and women who were willing to do that for a little more money! It shouldn’t be shocking that people have different preferences for jobs, just like they have different preferences for ice cream. In particular, it would be surprising to judges that men tend to focus more on pay, while “women are relatively more attracted to employers who value low-paying but high-paying non-paying traits (National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) 32408)” But the court rejected this idea, noting that taking demonstrated preferences seriously would amount to applying “an unfettered free-market supply and demand model.” That’s horrifying.
Now let’s consider how a job is considered “equivalent.” On the left is the job evaluation report for claimant Amanda Cox. The specific categories and numbers are not important. What matters is that the job is evaluated across 11 categories, and the point scores are added together to get a total score at the bottom.
Interestingly, the evaluators emphasize that they use: Same We weighted the categories. Of course we did. Because “equal” is synonymous with fairness, right? Unequal weighting would obviously be discriminatory!
is it so This isn’t something I made up:
Any plan that starts with “This qualification is the most important” or “This skill is essential” is almost always biased, or at least very likely to be accused of bias or discrimination.
So if you think that a certain skill is essential for a job, that’s discrimination!
(Also, equal weighting is just another form of weighting. Given the subjective nature of the categories and the scores assigned, equal weighting has no inherent superiority or objectivity.)
But that doesn’t matter. We haven’t gotten to the best part yet. The evaluator chose three warehouse workers and evaluated them using the same metrics. For example, Amanda Cox was compared to warehouse worker Calvin Hazelhurst, and the results are shown in the table on the right.
Can you spot anything surprising in this table? Let me give you a moment.
Any rational person could conclude from this table that the jobs are clearly: ~ No Equal. Amanda’s total score is 440, while Calvin’s total score is 340. 440 ≠ 340. Not even close! In almost every category (not surprisingly!), except for physical demands and working conditions, retail jobs require more points, namely “skills and responsibility.”
At this point, most people would stop and ask some important questions. If the jobs are so different in so many ways, isn’t it obvious that they are not equal? And why do jobs that seem to require less “skill” pay more? Could our rating system be oversimplifying? Could the market be telling us something that our crude rating system isn’t capturing? Is it time to check our assumptions?
But the evaluators don’t! Oh, no. The evaluators are happy, because the fact that the work is unequal proves that they are equal!
War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. Inequality is equality.
Adam Smith By 1776, our understanding of wages had improved significantly. More than British judges have today.
The wages of labor vary according to the ease or difficulty of employment, the cleanliness or filthiness, the honor or dishonour. Thus, in most places, the day-worker earns less than the day-worker all year round. His work is much easier. The day-worker earns less than the day-worker blacksmith. His work is not always easy, but it is much cleaner. The day-worker blacksmith, though a craftsman, earns as much in twelve hours’ work as the miner in eight. His work is not so dirty and less dangerous, and is done in the daytime, and on the ground. Honor is a great part of the rewards of all honorable professions. From the point of view of pecuniary gain, they are generally underpaid, all things considered. I will try to show this gradually. Dishonour has the opposite effect. The butcher’s trade is a cruel and abominable business; but it is in most places more profitable than most of the common trades. The executioner, the most abominable of all professions, receives more in proportion to the amount of work done than any other common trade.
Today Britain will convene a Labour Council to decide whether tailors and weavers should be paid the same. Do work of equal value. Case closed.
Labor committees inevitably lead to misdistribution of labor, which reduces both wealth and fairness. Serious misdistribution can lead to more interventions, and in the worst cases, to division by fiat. Politicization leads to division, profiteering, stagnant and unpleasant society.
More generally, the fact that it is not recognized bothers me. The market is a process of discoveryIt involves discovering the value of different skills and people’s preferences for different jobs, without the perception that the market is utilizing them. tacit knowledge and Knowledge of specific circumstances of time and placeKnowledge that is difficult to quantify, communicate, or transmit in a timely manner, and “the economic problems of society are largely related to the ability to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances.” Price is a signal wrapped in incentives..
It is disheartening to think that these fundamental ideas are the foundation of our liberal, global, prosperous civilization. In economic terms, in freedom of speech, Britain has fallen into the realm of oblivion.
supplement: Special hat tip Bruce Greig You were the one who informed me of this fact and even had the receipt.
The post Equality Act 2010 first appeared on Marginal REVOLUTION.
